Title: Bratfest at Tiffany’s
Author: Lisi Harrison
Publisher: Little Brown
Date: 2008
ISBN: 978-0-316-00680-4
Length: 227 pages plus advertising material
When I reviewed The Clique a few years ago, I didn’t expect it would become a
series, but it did. A bestselling series, at that. Where baby-boomers had
“Archie” comics, it seems, and Generation X had “Clueless,” millennials have
“The Clique.” It’s not exactly an encouraging prospect, but there we are.
Archie and his school friends were kids who had a
lot to learn, but they were goodhearted and well integrated; only a few of them
were rich. The “Clueless” crew were uniformly rich and deliberately sheltered
from knowing anything about the alternatives to being rich, but they meant well
in their shallow juvenile way. “The Clique” are uniformly rich, consciously
selfish, and intentionally mean. In the first book about them, when Massie and
Claire were thrown together through their parents’ business relationship,
Massie deliberately treated Claire badly, and poor silly Claire didn’t look
around for a better friend but wormed her way into Massie’s very conditional
and probationary good graces. In this book, which is volume eight, The Clique enter
grade eight and, even before they’ve assigned nasty nicknames to everyone in
grade seven, they all swear off having “boy friends” because they see the boys
as rivals for their “alpha” social status. The Clique are not actually popular
in the sense that people like them—only in the sense that shy selfconscious
people are afraid of mean-mouthed Massie—so, if any other group can be seen as
having got one up on them, the Clique will be “Losers Beyond Repair.” And still the others in The Clique want to
be Massie’s “friends.”
“The Boyfast” is Massie’s idea. Massie doesn’t
have a boy friend. The others have boy friends and worry about Massie throwing
them out of The Clique if they continue to treat these boys as friends.
Massie’s control cravings are so severe that this walking definition of
“spoiled brat” sets herself in opposition to adolescent hormone surges. Massie,
we’re told early in the story, does fantasize about talking to a psychologist,
but she’s too busy fighting for emotional control of other people to do it.
Meanwhile, the Octavian Country Day School, which
students call “OCD,” merges temporarily with another school called Briarwood,
so the students can refer to their school as “BO.” To relieve the crowding,
some students are temporarily assigned to special classes taught in old trailers
at the back of the campus. The Clique are split, with Massie and Claire in a
trailer. A TV reporter interviews Massie, observes some of the seventh-graders
in the trailer, and spins her report on the school situation in such a way as
to suggest that the trailers are being used for “special education.” The Clique
have to find a way to “prove” that they’re “alphas,” not “special,” before the
Briarwood school reopens and everyone returns to their regular classrooms, lockers,
and cafeteria tables.
Possibly the appeal of this series is that readers
agree with me that something does seem
to be wrong with these kids, and a little “special education” might be in order
for The Clique. As in, “Your parents, not you, will be asked to choose a total
of three outfits for you to wear, from their, not your, choice of Wal-Mart,
Target, or K-Mart. You will wipe your faces with alcohol before classes begin.
Each of you will be allowed to speak to one person, who will be chosen for you
from grade seven, and no one else for three months before you’re eligible to
graduate from this special program. To graduate you will work your way through
a year’s worth of grade nine algebra,
a grade ten reading list, Towle’s Biology, a grade eleven history course, and,
in view of the low standards of high school language classes, a college foreign language course. Plus Latin.”
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