The Real Real, by Emma McLaughlin and Nicola Kraus

The bestselling authors of "The Nanny Diaries" introduce a new heroine to root for: Jesse O'Rourke, coffee barista, high school senior, and unwitting reality TV star. 

Imagine there was never a "Laguna Beach," a "Newport Harbor," the shimmering "Hills." Imagine that your hometown--your school--is the first place XTV descends to set up cameras. 

Now imagine they've trained them on you. 

When Jesse O'Rourke gets picked for a "documentary" being filmed at her school in the Hamptons she's tempted to turn down the offer. But there's a tuition check attached to being on the show, and Jesse needs the cash so she can be the first in her family to attend college. All she has to do is trade her best friend for the glam clique she's studiously avoided, her privacy for a 24/7 mike, and her sense of right and wrong for "what sells on camera." . . . At least there's one bright spot in the train wreck that is her suddenly public senior year: Jesse's crush has also made the cast. 

As the producers manipulate the lives of their "characters" to heighten the drama, and "Us Weekly" covers become a regular occurrence for Jesse, she must struggle to remember one thing: the difference between real and the real real.


If a book is set in our world, it's kind of hard to imagine it without all the horrors of reality television which we cannot draw our eyes away from. Yet, that is what the authors of "The Real Real" expect us to do. Jesse and several of her classmates are chosen to be the first people to hand over their lives to the small screen, not knowing what they are getting themselves into. This small group of strangers, acquaintances, and friends, go through faux-ventures and adventures and have enough drama, both real and real real, to fill multiple novels. However, everything gets more complicated when Jesse's TV life gets mixed into her real one. Jesse has to deal with mixed messages from her crush, who is also one of the cast, her jealous best friend, a crazy director and even crazier producer, and college applications at the same time. I was amazed when everything turned out all right in the end.

Jesse was another one of those atypical typical teenagers, the type that claims at the beginning how normal she is over and over again and turns out to be special. It annoyed me how normal she said she was, because obviously as the protagonist of a young adult novel she is not normal. They never are. I would have enjoyed The Real Real more if Nico or Drew was the main character instead. It would have been interesting to see what those two had to say about her. Nico especially interested me, as the gorgeous supposedly mean and above-it-all blonde who turns out really nice in the end. She would have made an awesome protagonist.

One more thing: when two authors write a book together how does that work? Do they take turns writing chapters? Do they deliberate over each word together? Or does one use her imagination and the other her vocabulary? Won't someone satiate my curiosity? I've been wondering this for a very long time.

I apologize for this lame review but to say anything else about this book would be a waste of words.

3.5 stars. I think the only thing that kept me going was because of the psychology of it all. Pretty intense.