Emancipated

Gr 10 Up—The situation is any adolescent's fantasy: six beautiful teenagers living together in a house on Venice Beach without parents. For different reasons, each of the young people—two boys and four girls—have been emancipated from their parents. Though they promise to finish school and pay their rent, trouble finds them. As Lucy's music career takes off, Candace finds success as an actress, and Paulo works on his tennis game (he's a very in-demand tennis pro for reasons not just related to his athletic prowess), each of the characters' pasts catches up to them. In the tradition of other popular teen dramas—like Lauren Conrad's "L.A. Candy" and Sara Shepard's "Pretty Little Liars" (both HarperCollins) —the six housemates are all hiding something: a past mistake, their true identity, or their real intentions, and things get messy when their worlds converge. Set up as the first in a series and told with alternating points of view, Emancipated is careful to sketch the characters' complicated worlds for maximum dramatic impact. The book ends just as the teens' truths are starting to reveal themselves.