Funny and fanciful tales

JEANE Smith, 17, writes a style column for a Japanese teen magazine and she manages a successful lifestyle website that promotes dorkiness as an art form. On top of that, The Guardian placed her at number seven on their “people who are changing the world” list.

Middle School: My Brother Is A Big, Fat Liar THRILLER writer James Patterson’s offers another instalment of the funny Middle School series that began with Middle School: The Worst Years Of My Life.

In this book, we meet Georgia, sister of the mischievous star of the previous books, Rafe Katchadorian. Georgia is just entering middle school (the American equivalent of Malaysia’s secondary school level) and makes a bet with Rafe that she’s going to do so much better than he did – little knowing that Rafe had been so infamous that no one wants to give his sister a chance to prove herself.

Wanting to sway the odds of winning the bet in his favour, Rafe secretly signs up Georgia’s band to perform at the school dance. In front of her crush and her rivals, the snooty popular Princesses! How is Georgia going to handle this curve ball? WHAT happens when a geeky, awkward girl gets a chance to reinvent herself as a fashion model? Harriet is most definitely a geek – she knows facts like, the average person laughs 15 times a day and that a cat has 32 muscles in each ear but can’t figure out why she’s not popular at school. Then she gets talent scouted by a top model agent and is determined to change her life.

Along the way, though, she has a terrible fight with her BFF, catches the unwanted attention of the queen bee, the dreaded Alexa, and finds herself constantly lying to the people she loves. In the fashion industry, things aren’t going too well either, as Harriet veers from one fashion disaster to another.

That’s when she realises that perhaps this model life is not for her after all. But will Harriet be able to get her old life back before getting consumed by her own model behaviour? CompiledbyAngelinYeoh