Diary of a Girl Next Door: Betty

June 1, 2014
Riverdale's favorite good girl, Betty Cooper, is reimagined in a Dork Diaries knockoff. Betty Cooper, a perky, blonde go-getter, is ready to tackle her freshman year at Riverdale High. Her on-again, off-again best frenemy, Veronica Lodge, has taken up with the Glossies, a clique of older mean girls determined to make Betty miserable at every opportunity. Veronica and Betty are both crushing on the cute and freckled nice-guy Archie: Whom will he choose? Her melodramatic social woes aside, Betty is forever trying new things: BMX bike riding, becoming a dog walker and joining school clubs. While she does attempt lots of new things to figure out what she likes, most times it's really only to get Archie's attention. For the most part, she's blandly vanilla, though she occasionally comes into her own when she loses her temper (usually with Veronica) and shows a bit of dimensionality. With prose interspersed with cutesy drawings, del Rio and Galvan attempt to give Betty a modern feel, but at times these efforts fall flat; cellphones are not nearly as prominent at Riverdale High as they are in real life, for instance. Think of this as a watered-down Dork Diaries meeting the pleasant forgettability of Saved by the Bell. High on pep, low on memorability. (Graphic/fiction hybrid. 9-13)

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