Review Detail

Reader reviewed by Sami

My 1st review! Whoo-hoo! Ok, so Private starts out w/Reed Billings (main character) and her dad on the road to Easton Academy. She desperately wants to get away from her blah-gray town. She comes into the parking lot and is immediately enveloped in Louis Vuitton, limos, and beautiful people of all sorts. She doesn't belong and she knows it. She's a scholarship student from Pennsylvania with a wardrobe from Wal-Mart and a scratched Subaru. However, she wants to fit it and she makes a sort of an effort. That night she is looking out her window homesick and sees the Billings Girls across the quad in their dorm. The four of them are mesmerizing and she can't look away. A couple minutes later, one of them notices her and looks straight at her. Reed looks down, embarrassed, until she can no longer stand the tension. She raises her head and sees the face of that magnificent girl. She smiles and closes the curtains.
The following day, those four girls spot her in the cafeteria. The (obvious) leader, Noelle, calls Reed a glass-licking 'Peeping Tom' and asks her not to spy on them anymore. That doesn't sound that harsh, right? Well, when the person saying it to you has a snotty attitude and everybody is watching, it's pretty much public humiliation. With that embarrassment, the fact that none of the teachers seem to like her, and she still can't figure out this mysteriously dangerous boy who may like her and she might possibly like him, the year isn't really getting off to a terrific start.
Surprisingly, later in the book, the girls don't hate her as much as she thinks, she actually gets the boy, and with a friend's help, she's able to do better in school. The book then turns for her and everything she thought was different. Read the book if you want to figure out where Reed ends up. I thought it was good. She is a strong character if she feels like it, but she's very relatable and you find yourself hoping that she gets ahead. You, yourself, can't decide between the boy and the friends. Read it; you won't be sorry.