Haters (review)

Pasquala Rumalda Quintana de Archuleta is quite happy with her mellow life in Taos: she and her two best friends are the popular girls in their high school, she has plenty of mountain trails to bike, and she's finally gotten a date with the hottie she's been crushing on. When her cartoonist father comes home from L.A. with a movie contract for his comic-book superhero and tells her they are moving out there, she therefore protests. Her psychic grandmother assures her she'll be okay as long as she doesn't ignore her own paranormal gifts, which Paski has every intention of doing—she'll stick with her gift for mountain biking and keep her scary visions to herself. As Paski reluctantly sorts her way through the freaks, geeks, and it girls of her new high school, she finds herself hospitalized due to a drugged drink and a dunking in a pool, invited into the inner circle of a truly evil trio of hateful girls, and hopelessly in love with the ex of the queen hater. Her vision of her rival's serious accident in a motocross competition forces her to refocus her priorities and eventually leads to a restructuring of the school's social hierarchy. The most comedic moments of this action-packed chick-lit odyssey are Paski's exasperated descriptions of her father's transformation from mild-mannered granola-munching artist from Taos into a label-conscious, iced Chicano low-rider with a vocabulary straight outa BET. Reminiscent of Serros' Honey Blond Chica (BCCB 9/06) but way funnier, the book offers an enlightening side note in the form of insights into L.A. teen culture, where everyone's ethnicity is a mixed jumble and the only thing that matters is dollars in the bank, and into the subtle play of differences in attitude between the business people and the talent that fuels the Hollywood machine. These details, along with Paski's fresh, humorous voice, take this a step beyond typical mean-girl fare.