Reviewed by Rosie Malezer for Readers' Favorite

Surf Shop Sisters is a novella written by Laura Kennedy. Sixteen-year-old Brooke Bentley and her best friends, Sudsy and Tamara, are looking forward to Coral Cove High School’s homecoming dance. Their friend, Maria, however, is devastated when her parents forbid her to attend with her non-Greek boyfriend who is about to be deployed to Iraq. The three girls come to her aid, weaving an intricate lie that will see Maria’s dream come true. Brooke’s boyfriend dumps her just before the dance for putting other people’s needs ahead of his, while her parents ground her for lying about the girls’ plans for the dance. Although Brooke cannot hang out with her friends, she is still able to see them at the surf shop where they work, Surf’s Up. Brooke decides to write about the experience for a school assignment, in the hopes that at least one good thing comes of the whole debacle. When she receives compliments on her graded paper from the teacher for her honesty, Brooke’s feelings of self-worth start to return and things start looking up, but with her now representing the school in a Vocabulary Bee, Brooke is under pressure and knows that she will have to work extra hard – not just to win back her parents’ trust but to also bring victory to her school. With each of her friends going through life-changing ordeals of their own, Brooke takes on their problems as well as her own, causing a level of stress she never thought possible. She knows that as long as they have each other, the four girls can get through anything, especially when one of them is accused of a crime they didn’t commit.

Laura Kennedy’s tale of four best friends who stick together through thick and thin is fun, heartwarming, and filled with the usual drama of teenage girls. Whether it be boyfriend troubles, poor grades, covering each other’s shifts at work, or investigating crime, the Surf Shop Sisters do not take things lightly. As per any high school, Coral Cove High has students of all types. The four main characters themselves come from different backgrounds and their personalities clash on occasion, but their friendship creates an impenetrable wall which troublemakers find difficult to break down. The rich snob, Paris, who treats everybody around her as subservient, is the ringleader of bad news and, as uppity as she behaves, her character is quite complex, yet believable. Many lessons could be learned from the drama in Surf Shop Sisters, which I very much enjoyed reading. I recommend it to all readers who enjoy books about teenage antics filled with fun, adventure, trauma, drama, and life lessons.