Revenge of the Girl with the Great Personality by Elizabeth Eulberg

Lexi’s always been the funny one, the girl with the great personality. Everybody loves to hang out with her because they can always count on her to make them laugh. And while that’s all fine and well, lately Lexi has been getting tired of being shoved into that category. She wants guys to see her as girlfriend material, not just as a friend who’s a girl. But how can she get everyone to start thinking about her differently? With a little help from her friends and some inspiration from the beauty pageant scene her seven-year-old sister Mackenzie frequents, Lexi hatches a plan: with a little makeup and some hair product, Lexi’s going to be the new beauty queen at school. But things don’t quite turn out as planned, and Lexi will have to figure out, under her new exterior, who she really wants to be.

With a fabulous title like Revenge of the Girl with the Great Personality and the promise of the lighter and darker sides of beauty pageants, I knew that I would enjoy this book before I picked it up. My instincts were correct, and I blew through this story. I was expecting quite a few laughs, but I wasn’t as prepared for how heartwrenching Lexi’s story could be at times; Eulberg adds a lot of depth to what could have been a more frivolous, lighthearted look at the beauty scene by including the complexities of Lexi’s family as well as her desire to break out of her “great personality” shell. I’m not always a fan of stories that aren’t completely or mostly self contained, since I find a lack of concrete conclusion unsatisfying, but even though everything doesn’t wrap up for Lexi at the end of this book, I still left her story with a sense accomplishment—that Lexi had grown as a person and that she was on her way to living her life on her terms. So, even if she doesn’t get everything she’d hoped for at the beginning of her story, in terms of guys and her family, she’s become more comfortable with herself, as a girl who’s proud to have a great personality. And that made for a very satisfying story.

Fans of Eulberg’s earlier novels, especially The Lonely Hearts Club, will not want to miss Revenge of the Girl with the Great Personality, nor will readers who also enjoyed North of Beautiful by Justina Chen and My Big Nose and Other Natural Disasters by Sydney Salter.

Rating: 4.5

Review copy from publisher Scholastic