Starred Review Best high-school friends Angela, Maddie, and Zoe have graduated and are off to different universities. Maintaining the characters, voices, and accessible replication of text and instant messaging as the narrative mode, Myracle succeeds in showing resonant and varied views of the first semester of college. Angela, who has stayed in Georgia, pursues sorority acceptance. Zoe, in Ohio, has a bad breakup but finds an emerging sense of her internal strength. Maddie, lonely in California, hides her own troubles from her old friends by getting them through the vagaries of their new lives with the rallying cry of you only live once. Myracle manages to portray depth in all those messages: the friends acknowledge their incipient racism, openly discuss sexual experimentation, and help each other through such misadventures as harboring a homeless man, feeling domestic alienation, and enduring a professor's soul-crushing put-down. This honest, nuanced, accessible, and credible account provides teen girls with an authentic and skillfully told description of college life. The story, which can stand independently from the rest of the Internet Girls series, offers readers realistic, engaging, and provocative perspectives on scary first semesters away from home and sage advice about drinking, partying, and shutting down socially, all without ever leaving the perfectly crafted text-message flow. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Myracle's Internet Girls series made the New York Times best-seller list, and those fans will want to know how Zoe, Maddie, and Angela handle college.

Now at college, Angela, Zoe, and Maddie (ttyl; ttfn; l8r, g8r) keep each other updated on their lives through (gimmicky and tiresome) IMs, texts, and tweets. Maddie wants them all to try new things (YOLO!), and college brings no shortage of new situations. The girls navigate sex, drinking, hazing, jealousy, depression, and more in this frank look at transitions, identity, and friendship.

Gr 9 Up-Maddie, Angela, and Zoe are beginning their biggest adventure yetcollegeand they are doing it on their own. They encounter many challenges—failure, drunkenness, heartbreak, and successes— and ultimately discover their true friends. Maddie embraces the California lifestyle and is assigned to a suite with three other girls referred to as the "Esbees" because they are from Santa Barbara. Maddie tries hard to find her niche within this group, but soon becomes aware of how challenging it is to be accepted into an already-established social circle. In the first few months of college, Maddie is almost unable to continue with the yolo (you only live once) mission especially when her parents can't afford to fly her home for Thanksgiving break. Angela enters college drawn to the Greek lifestyle of partying, fraternity socials and the appeal of belonging but sees that she may not agree with all of the initiation rituals and the unwritten rules. Through her association with the Zeta's, she finds herself in some questionable situations and one specifically alters the rest of her college choices. Zoe decides to attend a liberal college and try a long-distance relationship with her boyfriend, Doug but realizes that they have both moved on. After overcoming her depression, she also learns that she loves to run to release stress, and she experiments with her sexuality. Zoe faces failure in a creative writing class when a professor does not recommend her to keep moving through the program, but she is not discouraged. Told in Internet-age style of text messages and tweets first seen in Myracle's ttyl (Abrams, 2004), the girls try to embrace the free-spirited yolo philosopy as they grow into their young adulthood.— Jessica Lorentz Smith, Bend Senior High School, OR