“High school is complicated, and the lines of demarcation that The Breakfast Club said divided us aren’t quite so clean-cut…..But there’s still those outliers. The people who are everywhere but fit nowhere. People who are involved but not envied — present but imperfect — so the scrutiny pushes them out of the race. People like me.”

Liz Lighty is Black in a mostly-White high school. She’s smart and driven and fatherless and now motherless. She’s poor and she’s musical and she rocks at community service. Oh, and when she meets the new girl, Mack, she realizes she’s queer.

A high school senior, Liz knows exactly what she wants: she wants to attend her mother’s alma mater, Pennington College, play in their orchestra and go on to medical school. With her excellent grades and extra-curricular activities, she’s confident she’ll get the scholarship needed to make her dreams a reality. But when she doesn’t get the scholarship she had counted on, there’s only one thing to do: run for prom queen and earn the generous scholarship for “outstanding service and community engagement.” As an outlier, what are Liz’s chances of rising to the top of the 25 girls in the run for prom queen? Does the title of the book give away the ending, or set the reader up to wish good things could happen to good people? This book tackles tough teenage angst in a book that is a laugh a page.