I'm not sure how I feel about this book, the narrator is someone I didn't have any sympathy with, especially at first, and too many exclaimation marks were used, but I actually enjoyed the first part of the story, and thought it the idea behind it was great, the only problem was, I guessed what had happened early on, so spent the rest of the book a bit bored, I was hoping to be proved wrong by the end, but was disappointed. ( )

This was quite a strange book. I couldn't stand the main character and how conceited she was, but I think that was the point. It's still hard to read about someone so self-centered, and it was very weird in the end when she turned out to be *spoiler alert* insane. I guess it was an interesting twist in the story but the book wasn't all that enjoyable. I really didn't know where the story was going most of the time. I didn't see the point and I still don't see it. ( )

NOW YOU SEE HER by Jacquelyn Mitchard is a frightening look inside the head of a very confused girl. The book is, essentially, the journal of Hope - a girl in trouble.The event that led to her downfall unfolds throughout the course of the story. It involves a boy, “The Plan”, “The Idea”, and Romeo and Juliet.Jacquelyn Mitchard, author of MIDNIGHT TWINS, has written another thought-provoking book. She has created a character that is a little hard to like while at the same time weaving a story the reader doesn’t want to put down. Hope’s stream of consciousness style gives authenticity to this story that really makes it feel like a young girl’s journal.If you like books that make you question what is really going on and not being able to predict exactly how it is going to end, you need to read NOW YOU SEE HER. ( )

Hope Shay is going to be famous; at least that is what her mother says as she sends her off to art school. Hope has already been in several predictions and is willing to do anything to become famous. When things start not going Hope's way; she can't get the guy; she didn't get the role in the school play she wanted; Hope decides to do something drastic. She stages her own kidnapping. ( )

Hope Shay—real name Bernadette Romano—is a talented fifteen-year-old actor whose desire to perform is ambiguously mixed up with her mother’s hardcore stage mother actions. We meet Hope when she’s at a strict prep-like school called Miss Taylor’s for supposedly faking her own kidnapping. Hope has got it good: the lead role in her prestigious arts school’s production of Romeo and Juliet, a blossoming acting career, the right clothes. So why would someone like her do what she did?

In her journal, Hope writes about always being prettier/skinnier/more talented than everyone else, and thus being the object of everyone’s envy. At Starwood, she has no friends except for her “boyfriend” Logan Rose, the good-looking senior with a score of commercials and TV roles—even a part in a movie!—to his name. Hope believes that they are madly in love, and Logan even talks of them running off to New York or LA together.

Then Logan hatches The Idea, which involves them faking Hope’s kidnapping, demanding a $20,000 ransom from her parents, and Logan dramatically rescuing her, thereby putting him in such good graces with her parents that they will allow the two teenagers to go wherever they’d like, school be damned. Strangely, however, as opening night and the initiation of The Idea nears, Logan seems to draw away from Hope, hanging out with another girl instead. Borderline desperate, Hope is convinced that the only way she can prove her love for him is to carry out with the faked abduction.

However, things do not go as planned, as Hope goes from being famous for her acting ability to being famous for being the harbinger of the hoaxed abduction…and learns a few startling things about herself and her life as a result.

NOW YOU SEE HER is sort of strange, but strangely satisfying. Hope comes off as a slightly whiny, narcissistic teenager, but through her journal entries and her revelations we come to empathize with her. This book is a telling of an adventure such as only a drama queen can tell it…and it is really good. ( )