All’s Fair in Love, War, and High School
By Janette Rallison
Walker & Company, 183 pages
Reviewed by Michele Ashman Bell

I might as well get it out of the way right now, this is a great book!  Even though the book is targeted for the Young Adult audience, its high entertainment value and valuable message makes it an enjoyable read for both youth and adults as well.

Janette Rallison has a great talent to get right to the heart of her characters, making them come alive on each page.  You can hear their voices, see their actions, and feel the pain that comes from the agony of trying to survive the challenges of high school.

The heroine of the book, Samantha Taylor, starts out as a self-centered, shallow Junior in high school who thinks the world revolves around her. Then, after several personal blows; receiving horrible SAT scores and getting dumped by her boyfriend, she turns to desperate measures to regain confidence in herself and her future.  Her solution . . . running for Student Body President, an office she is completely unqualified for but determined to win, at any cost.   By the end of the book she learns a very important life lesson that was difficult to live through, but well worth the humiliation and pain, leaving the reader very satisfied.

Filled with unexpected twists, hilarious insight, quick wit and agonizingly realistic and painful teenage life experiences, All’s Fair in Love, War and High School is a book that teens can easily relate to and learn from and will be a definite favorite, one they’ll want to tell all their friends about.  Janette Rallison should be crowned the “Queen of Zing” with her zippy one-liners and clever comebacks.  She is destined to become one of young adult fiction’s favorite authors. 

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