Savvy Girl by Lynn Messina

Lily may be life-guarding on a beach with cute guys during the summer, but her best friend Chrissy Gibbons has really hit the summer jackpot—she gets to intern for the hippest, coolest magazine that so many people love: Savvy! Despite having to do some mundane things during her internship internship, there are some definite perks: parties, cute guys like Michael Davies, and meeting ex-supermodels like Jessica Cordero.

To top things off, Savvy is holding a contest for the interns to determine who the first teenage Savvy columnist will be! Chrissy knows she’s the perfect candidate for the job, but she doesn’t have to worry about that yet, right? I mean, she has all summer to write her entry column. In the meantime, Chrissy would rather be setting up “chance” meetings with Michael and hitting the hotspots with Jessica at night!

But when Chrissy bails out on Lily over and over again so she can attend parties of famous designers and other star-studded events with Jessica (and stagger into her home at unearthly hours, more than a little buzzed) Chrissy might be turning into someone completely different. She wasn’t the kind of person to ditch her best friend all the time, and definitely wasn’t the kind of girl to stumble in drunk past midnight without letting her parents know where she was. But all of those things Chrissy used to care about seem to be tossed aside without a second thought when she gets constant invites to attend classy parties with Jessica.

Surely Lily understands why Chrissy can’t turn down these fantastic parties, right? Doesn’t Lily have that cute guy Graham to hang out with, doesn’t she? And Chrissy can hardly turn down Michael when he wants to hang out with her!

But is all this glitz and glamour really that good for Chrissy? She’s come to work more often hung over than not, and she’s already caught Michael hitting on hot girls at the parties she brings him to, more than once. She’s become a rebellious party girl who’s lost her good sense and put herself above her friends and family. And with the summer quickly drawing to a close, Chrissy better shape up and think of what to write, or she may miss out on a great opportunity to become a Savvy columnist—and may even lose her best friend!

At first Chrissy didn’t act and sound mature enough to be a seventeen year old, but that quickly passed. Savvy Girl was a very realistic novel with, in my opinion, well crafted and believable characters. After becoming a Savvy intern and getting invited to a few bashes, Chrissy acted like most sixteen-year-old girls would after hitting a few high-class parties and meeting cutes guys for the first time. All the same, it was nice to see her grown up and learn more than how to file papers during her summer internship and adventure!