Tish Cohen’s poor-girl-goes-to-posh-private-school story has the first-person narrator, present-tense mode, and flashback-to-traumatic-event technique that is de rigueur in such works these days. It also has a familiar plot: Sara Black, daughter of her school’s new janitor, finds herself stealing, lying, and cheating to fit in with the ruling girls after she moves to Boston and enters “North America’s Most Elite and Most Bizarre” high school.

While Sara’s moral quandaries, her initially weak decisions, and her ultimate triumph (moral and romantic) might be predictable, Cohen’s creative intelligence and sure-footed prose style ensure the novel is both lively and humourous. Her pacing is sharp, and her language has the capacity to surprise. A father with “hair that rises toward the ceiling like angry black flames”; an offhand comment that “supernumerary nipples are not a joke”– unpredictable elements such as these make this an engaging read.

Cohen also treats the subsidiary theme of Sara’s father’s obsessive-compulsive disorder with understanding and compassion, and her characterization of Sara as a serious math whiz is refreshing. All of which makes for a mature and more substantial alternative to some of the other high school novels out there.