Spotlight Wednesday - RIVAL by Sara Bennett Wealer

What if your worst enemy turned out to be the best friend you ever had?

Meet Brooke: Popular, powerful and hating every minute of it, she’s the “It” girl at Douglas High in Lake Champion, Minnesota. Her real ambition? Using her operatic mezzo as a ticket back to NYC, where her family lived before her dad ran off with an up and coming male movie star. 

Now meet Kathryn: An overachieving soprano with an underachieving savings account, she’s been a leper ever since Brooke punched her at a party junior year. For Kath, music is the key to a much-needed college scholarship. 

The stage is set for a high-stakes duet between the two seniors as they prepare for the prestigious Blackmore competition. Brooke and Kathryn work toward the Blackmore with eyes not just on first prize but on one another, each still stinging from a past that started with friendship and ended in betrayal. With competition day nearing, Brooke dreams of escaping the in-crowd for life as a professional singer, but her scheming BFF Chloe has other plans. And when Kathryn gets an unlikely invitation to Homecoming, she suspects Brooke of trying to sabotage her with one last public humiliation. 

As pressures mount, Brooke starts to sense that the person she hates most might just be the best friend she ever had. But Kathryn has a decision to make. Can she forgive? Or are some rivalries for life?

~*~

Oooh, are you ready for some SINGING? And look at the authors singing this book's praises:


"This book gets it all exactly right--friendships, envy, and the fact that you can never truly know another person." ~ Sara Zarr, National Book Award Finalist


"Awesome, awesome, and more awesome. Not one wrong note." ~ Lauren Myracle, NYT Bestselling author


Sounds like GLEE fans are going to love Sara's book. I know Sara is a fan of the show. Here's one of her favorite performances, which I grabbed from her personal blog.

I'm thinking RIVAL is going to be a teenage dream!! Yay for RIVAL - pick it up at a bookstore near you!