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This girl's amazing. I know that she probably had some editorial help, but I still can't believe a thirteen-year-old girl can write so well. Thirty-year-old Jessica is jealous, and the ghost of thirteen-year-old Jessica is crying her eyes out somewhere deep inside me. I wish I'd had this back then. It would have been a really good thing for me, I think.

I had a really unique high school experience. I went to a small, rural school district where almost everyone was somebody’s cousin. If there were serious clique issues in my graduating class, I was completely unaware of them. I wasn’t a particularly social teen, so it’s possible that I was just oblivious but the social strata I experienced was primarily made up of what we called “rutters� (the poor kids you might otherwise think of as rednecks) and everyone else. It might have been a lot harder if you were considered a “rutter,� and I know it was a lot harder for the few minorities and gay kids, but otherwise social status wasn’t a huge part of the conversation. It’s not like everyone was friends or we existed in some teenage utopia or anything, but we didn’t have the strictly defined cliques you’re used to seeing in media portrayals of high school.

All that being said, I did spend a lot of time thinking about being “cool� and fitting in. I was shy and socially awkward. I had a hard time making conversation with people and often resorted to sarcasm as a defense mechanism. In retrospect, I probably came off more as a jerk than as an insecure girl but it’s really hard to put yourself out there in such a confident way. It’s still something I’m working on in my thirties. That’s why thirteen-year-old Maya is so impressive.

Maya describes herself as living on the bottom rung of popularity � above only the people who are paid to be at school. She hangs out with her small group of Social Outcasts, all of whom mostly just try to keep their heads down and get by. Then one day, she finds an old copy of the sixty-year-old book Betty Cornell’s Guide to Teenage Popularity and decides to follow the advice inside for her entire eighth-grade year and write about the experience. She does things like follow specific haircare and skincare routines, dresses like a 1950s teenager, and learns how to go out and talk to the kids she’s always been scared of.

Maya strikes me as what we old fogies would call “precocious� � I mean, she managed to get a book published by the time she turned fifteen. And she had the stones to undertake this kind of project in the first place. Not many adults would be brave enough to walk up to total strangers and make conversation. The lessons that Maya ultimately learns—popularity isn’t so much about your clothes or your hair as it about your attitude and the way you make others feel � may seem kind of obvious to anyone who’s out of school, but I super highly recommend this book for parents of daughters who are in middle or high school.