The Naughty List (review)

Tessa Crimson leads a double life in more ways than one. To all of the kids in her high school, she is the unfailingly peppy cheerleading captain with the perfect boyfriend, but to the girls, she is also leader of a secret spy agency that uses high-tech surveillance equipment and cheerleading athletic skills to catch boys cheating on their girlfriends. However, her double life goes deeper than that: since her parents' marital troubles, she's been cultivating an aura of perpetual cheerfulness to make everyone else happy, no matter how bad she feels inside. For the most part, pretending to be perky leads to feeling it, but she's constantly aware of the fact that her performance is both put-on and necessary. This character trait adds poignancy to an otherwise straightforward action/comedy/romance plot, enlisting real sympathy for Tessa as her life is purposefully wrecked by a new boy and his sister who take seriously the old adage that everything is fair in love and war. There's a definite sexist and cynical cast here as only (and nearly all) boys cheat while girls are innocent victims, and even though it's never explicitly narrated, it's clear that these spy girls are taking pictures of lots of sex acts. With these caveats in mind, however, readers scorned can engage in plenty of vicarious fury and just a touch of empathetic sorrow as Tessa tries to keep it together as her selfless efforts on behalf of chronic cheerfulness cause her to lose what matters most to her.