Part way through the school year, she resolves to leave her best friend Hazel, who is considered “uncool” at the school, and befriend the more popular Natasha, her former best friend who she lost two years before when Natasha became “cool.” Hazel, a smart, egotistical, quirky girl, denounces Truly at the same time, saying that the popular girls are beneath her and that she will never be Truly’s friend after being treated as disposable.

Truly is now known for excelling at school, seeming to be a seemingly perfect student and a kind of foil to her two siblings who live with disabilities. Life at school isn’t helped by new middle school vocabulary, which welcomes constant insults such as “wannabe slut” and “raging bitch.” Two years later, when she turns 13, her parents give her a cell phone and approve access to social media. The novel begins when sixth-grade Truly is trying to negotiate the complex emotional relationships that blossomed at the onset of middle school and puberty. Rotating through multiple characters’ perspectives, the book is also a character study on how individuals in emotionally fraught periods of life try to rationalize their somewhat directionless identities. Following a middle school-age protagonist named Truly and her classmates Clay, Hazel, Brooke, Natasha, and Jack, who deal with and actively enrich middle school chaos, it addresses the problem of bullying in young adult life. It concerns the problems that emerge out of the combination of social media and digital communication within formal educational environments. Unfriended is a 2014 middle grade fiction novel by Rachel Vail.

Gorgeous by rachel vail