Like The Red Panda — Andrea Seigel

Stella is a girl we all know but rarely meet in fiction -- seventeen, smart, attractive, and deeply alienated. In this novel, she narrates her last two weeks of high school in Orange County, California. Here is what it is like to be a smart high school senior, already philosophically far, far away but still expected to endure the absurdly intensive AP final exams, the cool posturing of the boys, and the unnecessary competitiveness of the girls. Beneath Stella's mordantly funny take on her life is the decisiveness with which she disengages from it.

With unflinching honesty, remarkable wit, and a spare, vivid prose, Stella turns her farewell to suburbia into a wry philosophical inquiry.