Rival Review

From Goodreads:
  
Meet Brooke: Popular, powerful and hating every minute of it, she’s the “It” girl at Douglas High in Lake Champion, Minnesota. Her real ambition? Using her operatic mezzo as a ticket back to NYC, where her family lived before her dad ran off with an up and coming male movie star.  

Now meet Kathryn: An overachieving soprano with an underachieving savings account, she’s been a leper ever since Brooke punched her at a party junior year. For Kath, music is the key to a much-needed college scholarship.

The stage is set for a high-stakes duet between the two seniors as they prepare for the prestigious Blackmore competition. Brooke and Kathryn work toward the Blackmore with eyes not just on first prize but on one another, each still stinging from a past that started with friendship and ended in betrayal. With competition day nearing, Brooke dreams of escaping the in-crowd for life as a professional singer, but her scheming BFF Chloe has other plans. And when Kathryn gets an unlikely invitation to Homecoming, she suspects Brooke of trying to sabotage her with one last public humiliation.

As pressures mount, Brooke starts to sense that the person she hates most might just be the best friend she ever had. But Kathryn has a decision to make. Can she forgive? Or are some rivalries for life?

My Thoughts:  This is the last book I read in for my Different Area Codes book tours, and I'm sad to say goodbye to it.  But I'm glad that my last read was one of my best.  Rival was a great book, both Kathryn and Brooke were complete, fleshed out characters.  I really thought before I started the book that I'd be able to choose sides, that one girl would be "right" and the other girl would be "wrong".  But like in life, both girls contributed to the demise of their friendship, and both did things that weren't particularly nice.  The major problem in their friendship was that they both assumed too much- each thinking the other understood or knew things that had never been spoken of or made clear. 

God knows I've made that mistake plenty of times in my relationships.  We take it for granted that our friends and family know us, know what we're feeling, yet we often chafe under their definition of us.  Brooke and Kathryn crossed and then criss-crossed lines again and again.  After the event that leads to them not being friends anymore, neither really takes the time to reflect on it until suddenly they find themselves in competition.

I loved the setting of the book- music, chorus, singing competitions are not usual backgrounds in YA novels.  Brooke and Kathryn both have lovely voices, but as a alto and soprano they are never in direct competition until they both get a chance at a prestigious scholarship.  Brooke needs it to prove that music is important to her, that she can do it on her own, and Kathryn needs it to pay for college.  Suddenly the events of the past year are very much on their minds, and they finally take a good long look at what happened. 

In the end I couldn't pick sides.  Both girls have their good sides and bad sides.  It was really refreshing to read a YA book that wasn't about good vs. evil, but a look at real life drama.  Now I'm not a music girl, I can barely carry a tune despite the fact that I was in chorus and love music, I had no trouble getting absorbed into the world of musical competition.  Now if only some author would write about the drama that was my high school's Reading Team experience...

Rival by Sara Bennett Wealer gets a Midnight Book Rating of 11:30pm.   I will definitely be on the lookout for her future novels!