Reviewed by Amber Gibson for TeensReadToo.com

NOW YOU SEE HER is an amazingly realistic look into the life of a self-centered girl who has been showered with attention from her parents all of her life. Bernadette, or Hope, her stage name, dreams of being a famous actress--and she is willing to do anything to get to the top. Her mother has always pushed her so hard, and now her mother's dreams for Hope are her own. Hope knows she's the best and explains that her lack of friends is simply because everyone is jealous of her talent. At fourteen, she is accepted into Starwood Academy, a prestigious acting school in Michigan. Hope is sure that this is where her career will take off, and she doesn't mind in the least that she is a bit of an outcast. After all, she has Logan. Logan Rose. The most amazing boy she has ever met. Hope finds herself lost in her infatuation with Logan. Everything in her life revolves around their budding romance.

The two of them formulate a plan, a plan to elope when Logan graduates. Their plan requires one thing, money, which they plan to extract from Hope's parents by faking her abduction. Faking a kidnapping is risky business, but Hope is willing to do anything for Logan, anything for their future together. Hope dreams of the day when the two of them will be winning Academy Awards together, the perfect couple.

Hope's story is told through her own eyes, and I felt every emotion with her. I felt the pride in her triumphs as well as the pain of feeling lost and confused, like you are the only one who knows the truth. But it is only at the end, when the real truth is finally revealed, that you realize that Hope Shay is not all that she appears to be. ( )

NOW YOU SEE HER by Jacquelyn Mitchard is a frightening look inside the head of a very confused girl. The book is, essentially, the journal of Hope - a girl in trouble.The event that led to her downfall unfolds throughout the course of the story. It involves a boy, “The Plan”, “The Idea”, and Romeo and Juliet.Jacquelyn Mitchard, author of MIDNIGHT TWINS, has written another thought-provoking book. She has created a character that is a little hard to like while at the same time weaving a story the reader doesn’t want to put down. Hope’s stream of consciousness style gives authenticity to this story that really makes it feel like a young girl’s journal.If you like books that make you question what is really going on and not being able to predict exactly how it is going to end, you need to read NOW YOU SEE HER. ( )

Hope Shay is going to be famous; at least that is what her mother says as she sends her off to art school. Hope has already been in several predictions and is willing to do anything to become famous. When things start not going Hope's way; she can't get the guy; she didn't get the role in the school play she wanted; Hope decides to do something drastic. She stages her own kidnapping. ( )

Hope Shay—real name Bernadette Romano—is a talented fifteen-year-old actor whose desire to perform is ambiguously mixed up with her mother’s hardcore stage mother actions. We meet Hope when she’s at a strict prep-like school called Miss Taylor’s for supposedly faking her own kidnapping. Hope has got it good: the lead role in her prestigious arts school’s production of Romeo and Juliet, a blossoming acting career, the right clothes. So why would someone like her do what she did?

In her journal, Hope writes about always being prettier/skinnier/more talented than everyone else, and thus being the object of everyone’s envy. At Starwood, she has no friends except for her “boyfriend” Logan Rose, the good-looking senior with a score of commercials and TV roles—even a part in a movie!—to his name. Hope believes that they are madly in love, and Logan even talks of them running off to New York or LA together.

Then Logan hatches The Idea, which involves them faking Hope’s kidnapping, demanding a $20,000 ransom from her parents, and Logan dramatically rescuing her, thereby putting him in such good graces with her parents that they will allow the two teenagers to go wherever they’d like, school be damned. Strangely, however, as opening night and the initiation of The Idea nears, Logan seems to draw away from Hope, hanging out with another girl instead. Borderline desperate, Hope is convinced that the only way she can prove her love for him is to carry out with the faked abduction.

However, things do not go as planned, as Hope goes from being famous for her acting ability to being famous for being the harbinger of the hoaxed abduction…and learns a few startling things about herself and her life as a result.

NOW YOU SEE HER is sort of strange, but strangely satisfying. Hope comes off as a slightly whiny, narcissistic teenager, but through her journal entries and her revelations we come to empathize with her. This book is a telling of an adventure such as only a drama queen can tell it…and it is really good. ( )

This novel was amazingly good. The spiral breakdown of the narrator and subsequent revelations are skillfully rendered. I was stunned. Mitchard manages to make a very unlikable girl into a bizarrely sympatetic character. ( )