Gayle Siebert has achieved the nearly impossible in WEMBLY. She’s made a book about teen angst a lot of fun to read.

The charm of the book lies in the first-person narrative of the protagonist, Lisa, a 17-year-old high school student. Lisa loves horses, doesn’t care about makeup, hair, or what’s cool to wear, and, therefore, she’s a misfit. She suffers a crushing betrayal by her best friend, gets bullied physically and verbally by the “popular kids,” and survives the death of a loved one. The thing about Lisa is she makes her way through all of this with humor and grace.

Lisa repeatedly tells her readers the they “can forget it” when she has no intention of doing whatever she thinks her readers might assume she’s going to do. (Example regarding her younger brother: “If you think I’m going to beg him to stay when he says he’s going across the street to Devon’s house, you can forget it.”) She also congratulates her readers with a “High Five to you” when she figures they may have guessed her intentions correctly.

I recommend this book to any high school student, popular or not; to the parents of high schoolers—there’s a lot to be learned here; and to anyone who enjoys a good read that’s honest and rings true. I laughed a lot!