Chloe Leiberman (Sometimes Wong)

December 1, 2005
Gr 9 Up -High school senior Chloe Wong Leiberman is all about fashion, 24/7. She actually has hallucinations when faced with people in fashion -Don'ts, - wherein she mentally re-creates their clothing faux pas with trendy wear. Despite living a life of privilege in a gated community in L.A., no one in her family seems to be happy or even functional. Her Chinese mother is a fashion and personal disaster, according to Chloe, and her Jewish father is too busy cutting the next big deal to pay much attention to anything his daughter really wants -which is to attend a prestigious fashion academy in London (Dad doesn't think it's high-brow enough). Written in what seems to be the current equivalent of Valley-speak, this novel is filled with the superficial self-obsessions of a spoiled, shallow, rich girl, which makes it difficult to be sympathetic to her woes. This style of writing and plot direction (or lack thereof) treats its presumed audience as though it were as small-minded and self-absorbed as the characters so ponderously portrayed. In doing so, the writer, the story, the characters, and the intended audience are, regrettably, irredeemably trivialized." -Roxanne Myers Spencer, Western Kentucky University, Bowling Green"

Copyright 2005 School Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

November 15, 2005
Gr. 7-10. Chloe utterly shocks her smug multicultural SoCal family by announcing that she hasn't applied for any college, or even taken her SATs. What with obsessing over her looks, plunging into hallucinatory fashion makeovers for everyone around her, and sneaking out of her parents' McMansion to catch a flea market with her chica best friend or one of her twentysomething musician boyfriend's gigs, who has " time"? Plainly having inherited her grandfather Leo Rosten's gift for ethnic-flavored comedy, the author places her sympathetically portrayed 17-year-old misfit in a broadly brushed Jewish-Chinese-Valley Girl milieu (appending a helpful glossary of Yiddish, Cantonese and stitchery jargon), throws in a wildly flamboyant contessa as a fashion mentor, and, in a final twist, turns what Chloe has despairingly dubbed her "Fashion Disorder" into the key to a suddenly promising future. Consider this debut " maximum" chick-lit.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2005, American Library Association.)

January 1, 2006
Chloe Wong-Leiberman is a half-Chinese, half-Jewish, all-American girl obsessed with fashion. As she mouths off about clothing faux pas and the like and the elitist ideals of her posh Californian community, Chloe's incessant criticism hovers between hilarious and exasperating. Though her caricatured parents forbid Chloe to apply to a London fashion-design college, the sassy teenager has other ideas. Glos.

(Copyright 2006 by The Horn Book, Incorporated, Boston. All rights reserved.)