The True Meaning of Cleavage -- Mariah Fredericks

cleav·age (klvj) n.

1. The act of splitting or cleaving.
...
6. Informal. The hollow between a woman's breasts, especially as revealed by a low neckline.

A lot of boppy teen-angsty high school books are really entertaining and have fun characters, but usually none of them (except sometimes--hopefully--the protagonist) are real people. (I mean, really. Lilly Moscovitz? There's not a whole lot there). The True Meaning of Cleavage does it right. The characters are real people; no one is completely, utterly awful, and no one is perfect.

A brief synopsis of this book makes it sound like one of those generic, run-of-the-mill YA novels: Jess (the geek) and Sari (the pretty rebel) are best friends, they start high school, Sari falls psychotically in love (her description) with a senior, problems ensue.

Jess would be happier with the more black and white world of science fiction (or, like I said, of many other books in Cleavage's genre):

A lot of people ask me why I love science fiction so much. Here's what I'll tell them if they ever ask me again: In science fiction, people are either good or evil. If they harm someone, it's because they want to. If they're good and they want to save people, they have the power to do that. There are no screw-ups in sci-fi. Nobody who would like to do the right thing but can't quite get it together. Nobody who doesn't mean to hurt someone but does it anyway. There's good and there's evil; you love one and you hate the other. And that's that.

Happily, Mariah Fredericks wrote this book in color.