IT'S NOT EASY BEING MEAN: Part One
(They Just Make It Look Easy)
Hey GLUs! Welcome back to book seven of The Clique Book Club!
Los Angeles was competitive, sure, but Massie, Claire, and Alisha are quickly reminded that Hollywood is tame compared to the cutthroat culture of a Westchester private. To start, the girls have to commit to an extracurricular activity if they want to get back into OCD. Kristen is Piss-ten when they choose soccer.
Claire’s celebrity glow-up has her struggling with a Hannah Montana identity crisis—am I a typical schoolgirl or an actress with a pushy agent who wants me to move back to Hollywood? It doesn’t help that her brother, Todd, is capitalizing on her fame by selling her clothes to fangirls from the Block’s driveway.
During his sale, Skye Hamilton, the eighth-grade alpha, hands Todd an envelope and instructs him to deliver it to the Pretty Committee. Inside is a DVD (Google it, young people) explaining that the clique that finds the key to a secret abandoned room at OCD will become next year’s eighth-grade Alphas. The only clue? It’s hidden under the bed of a Briarwood Boy that Skye has kissed—a list as long as the 2008 iPhone 3G launch line. Only this one includes Massie’s crush, Derrington.
Let’s discuss.
What would critics in 2025 say about a middle school girl who is proud of the long list of boys she’s kissed? Do you agree with those critics? Is Skye an empowered character or a troubled one?
What would critics in 2025 say about Claire choosing her crush over her career? Do you agree? Why?
Kristen doesn’t want her besties to join the soccer team. Does this make her a bad friend?
LFG (Let’s F-ing Gossip)!
Xoxo Lisi & Ellen
1. As a dude I will pass on this one.
2. I definitely consider a prestigious potential future career to be more important and rewarding than a middle school romance, but this argument works both ways: any mismatches (e.g. expectation vs. reality) will be magnified in show business. The social and physical demands of being a famous actress are too much for Claire at this time. She also wants some familiarity and stability in her life, as evidenced by her strong disapproval at her parents' plan to move to Chicago at the start of Invasion of the Boy Snatchers. So I think that even if Cam was out of the picture, Claire is probably better off living "normally" (elite private school) than as a movie star.
I think that if the other PC members were in Claire's shoes, then Massie and Alicia would pick Hollywood, Kristen would pick Westchester, and I'm not sure about Dylan.
3. Kristen's friends are neither interested in nor good at soccer, so I'd say that she was right in not wanting them on the team, especially for competitive play. In an ideal scenario, Massie, Alicia, and Dylan would have been encouraged to select a different activity before their return to OCD.
I can’t believe we’re already on book 7! Skye is an interesting character. I’m about to do a reread of the Alphas series for the first time in forever, and I remember liking her more in those books. Curious to see if that still holds up!
I think in 2025, people would absolutely be rooting for Claire to choose her career over her middle school relationship. They would want her to girl boss to her full potential, which is fair, but I also understand how at that age, Claire was ready to choose her first love over an unfamiliar new venture.
Kristen not wanting her friends to join the soccer team is also fair, because it’s her space to be an Alpha. She takes soccer seriously, and her friends ah-bviously are not going to feel the same. It was her arena to not have to worry about all the clique noise, and now they’re infiltrating it.