Like Mandarin

 By Kirsten Hubbard

14-year-old Grace Carpenter can't wait to get away from the badlands of Washokey, Wyoming, where she has lived her entire life. She can't wait to escape from her sister's beauty pageants, or all the people around her, to find real beauty in the world. Grace knows that the only true beauty in Washokey is 17-year-old carefree Mandarin Ramey. Grace would give anything to be like Mandarin.

When they are joined for a project, they form an unlikely friendship: Grace being Washokey's resident genius, and Mandarin being the notorious wild-girl. Their friendship is, like Mandarin, wild. Together they make a plan to run away together, to escape the town they're stuck in.

But Grace begins to realize that while Mandarin is fun, shameless, and carefree on the outside, she's actually troubled, unstable, and broken on the inside. And no matter how hard Grace tries to hold on to the carefree Mandarin, she realizes that being like Mandarin may not actually be all that great.

I think one of the main reasons that I really enjoy Kirsten Hubbard's books are because of the way she writes. It captures you from the first page. It was really easy to read this book because the characters are so relatable. The way that Mandarin was initially described made it so easy to understand why Grace idolized her.