{Synopsis} – Meet a guardian angel like no other, from a writer like no other. Bold, rising star Victoria Schwab returns with the second book in this whimsical, inspiring, and clever middle-grade series.
There's more to Aria than meets the eye. She's a guardian angel. And to earn her wings, she'll have to help three different girls. . . .
This time, Aria comes to Caroline Mason. At her all-girls' prep school, Caroline is being bullied. She eats lunch alone and is picked on by her classmates every day. The ringleader of the mean girls is Lily Pierce. But Lily isn't an ordinary bully: she used to be Caroline's best friend.
When Aria arrives, she can see Caroline is suffering. But, to Aria's surprise, so is Lily. What is the story behind Lily's cruel actions? And can Aria help guide Caroline out of the darkness . . . and into better, brighter future?
{My thoughts} – Aria is faced with a challenge in this book. Two best friends Caroline and Lily are no longer friends. Lily wanted to play a mean prank on the new girl at school and Caroline stopped it, sort of. However, since Caroline had interfered with Lily’s plans, she had then became the newest target to the meanness that Lily was able to dish out. Lily decided to become Caroline’s worst enemy and to have the whole school freeze her out. Aria has to decide how best to help both Caroline and Lily in this new book.
Caroline and Lily had been best friends for three years. It took one incident of Caroline standing up to Lily, for Lily to throw it all away. It’s sad to think about having a best friend one day and then not having that friend the next. However, it happens all to often in school. Kids can be cruel, it doesn’t matter if their reasons are justified, they do mean things in attempt to make themselves feel better. I am sure some do feel better for a short amount of time, but then that good feeling probably goes away again and leaves them alone and hurting inside jut like they were, before they had been mean to someone.
This book is classic in the sense it is about bullying, it is about how to handle it, it is about the rights and wrongs. I can tell you, that I know from experience how badly it can make you feel to be on the receiving end. But I also know it can only get better, and just because someone is able to hurt you, it doesn’t mean that you have to let them have long term effects on you. You have the right to ignore the bullying, to move past it and to be your own person. A person that is better then the person that is bullying you. A person that isn’t afraid to stand up for themselves and let the person that is hurting them know they are in the wrong. Sometimes standing up to someone is all you need to do to end bullying, but I know it doesn’t always work out that way, and that sometimes people do still get hurt because of all the bad. Sometimes the hurt lasts forever, but it does get easier to handle eventually. The best thing that someone being bullied can do is talk to someone and let someone of authority know what is going on so that intervention can take place and hopefully it can come to a positive end.
In Caroline’s case she had Aria to help her out. To look out for her and to show her that there was more to life, school and all then just being with the same friends that had hurt her. She was able to show her that she could make new friends and that those friends would treat her better then her old friends had. It just took Caroline awhile to accept what she was being told, it took her awhile to take it to heart. Once she took it all to heart things started to get much better for her and Aria had made sure that she didn’t get overly hurt by allowing her to make her own choices, the right choices. The choices that helped her to move forward instead of backwards.
Final Conclusion: 5 Star Rating.
