Stone, Phoebe. Deep Down Popular. NY: Scholastic, 2008. 280 pages. (General Fiction)Every grade has one outcast. It’s someone who doesn’t fit in, has no friends, and hides from all her other classmates. In this story, that outcast is Jessie Lou Ferguson. She’s a shy, 6th grader, living in the boring town of Cabanash, Virginia. She’s also been secretly in love with the most popular guy in school, Conrad Parker Smith, since the third grade. But then, one day Conrad came to school… with a leg brace. His popularity instantly started going down. He became less and less popular until, suddenly, he had no friends. And to make matters worse, the teacher assigned Jessie Lou to walk Conrad home every day after school and carry his books for him during school! She’s never even said one word to the guy! Will Conrad look past an image and fall in love with her or will Jessie Lou find that loving the popular boy is sometimes the worst possible thing you can do?
I liked this book. I thought it was really cute but kind of confusing. The author went all over the place with her writing. She would talk about things that happened in the past, and wasn’t very clear on when the story came back into the present. I would give this book a B.
Reviewed by: JustGuess
