Fat Hoochie Prom Queen

Large, loud Margarita truly hates student body president Bridget Benson, a stuck-up television star whom Madge was friends with when both were child actresses; so when Bridget challenges her to a contest to win prom queen, Madge tells her to “get ready to lose by a landslide.” There's plenty of drinking and swearing, but some memorable moments, too, as the competition heats up: Bridget and Margarita face off in a strange event at a party thrown by a character called Redneck Randy— they water-ski behind a truck, trying to jump gracefully into a lake at the ramp's end. Medina sets the story at the same high school as his first novel, The Straight Road to Kylie , and Margarita even visits that book's protagonist at college, a trip which ends with her passed out drunk on a football field, next to a box of Krispy Kremes (“The first thing I tasted when I came to was glaze on my lips”). The last-minute revelations about Bridget, and the inevitable reconciliation, might be hard to swallow, but readers will get a kick out of Margarita and appreciate her growing honesty with herself. Ages 14–up. (May)