In Too Deep-Jennifer Banash

In Too Deep
Jennifer Banash
Berkley, Jan 2009, $9.99
ISBN: 9780425223536

With her mom traveling in Europe, Casey McCloy left Normal, Illinois to attend the prestigious Meadowlark Academy in New York. She will live with her Nanna in the affluent Bramford Building in the Carnegie Hill section of Manhattan’s Upper East Side. She has come a long way from her initial shock at the elegance of her new digs and school as she loves living in the Big Apple.

She has the urbane teen look and a boyfriend Drew Van Allen, but lately is concerned that the real small-town Midwesterner has vanished underneath a sophisticated phony veneer and that if Drew peeled away the surface he would detest what he sees. The top gun of the social set at Bramford Madison MacAlister is irate that the farmer’s daughter is dating her Drew, whom she actually was not seeing when he turned to the country bumpkin. She wants Drew and plots to steal him while bringing normal back to the social stratosphere by humiliating and driving her rival back to Illinois.

The sequel to THE ELITE continues the adventures of the teenage country bumpkin navigating the shark infested waters of the east River’s upper class. The key cast characters are fully developed hyperbolically representing a “good vs. bad” High Noon showdown on Fifth Avenue and a few other elite Manhattan locales (this crowd thinks the boroughs are foreign nations) with Drew going to the victor. Although there are too many subplots occurring with several not resolved, fans of teen high society will relish the latest civil war between the forces of THE ELITE.

Harriet Klausner