With Friends Like These (Good Girlz)
The third in Billingsley's African American Christian Teen Fiction series that began withNothing but Drama(2006), this continues the story of four high-school juniors who become close friends in an after-school Baptist church youth group called the Good Girlz. The girls discover they are "not good at all" when they compete to host a Teen Talks TV show. Desperate to be on the air, they cheat, lie, and betray each other, and they become bitter enemies. Each book in the series has one of the Ten Commandments as its theme, and this one's "Thou shalt not bear false witness." But there is no heavy preaching. Even readers new to the series will be caught up in the fast, funny contemporary talk and in the alternating first-person viewpoints about boyfriends, family, class ("those people who live in public housing"), and color. Quarrels, smart-mouthing, and payback make great drama, and then, so does saying sorry.Hazel RochmanCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved