Genre: Young Adult
★ SYNOPSIS ★
Hadley Daniels is tired of feeling invisible.
After Hadley’s best friend moves away and she gets on the bad side of some girls at school, she goes to spend the summer with her grandparents in the Lake Michigan resort town of Grand Haven. Her next door neighbor is none other than teen TV star Simone Hendrickson, who is everything Hadley longs to be—pretty, popular, and famous—and she’s thrilled when Simone treats her like a friend.
Being popular is a lot harder than it looks.
It’s fun and flattering when Simone includes her in her circle, though Hadley is puzzled about why her new friend refuses to discuss her former Hollywood life. Caught up with Simone, Hadley finds herself ignoring her quiet, steadfast friend, Charlotte.
To make things even more complicated, along comes Nick Jenkins…
He’s sweet, good-looking, and Hadley can be herself around him without all the fake drama. However, the mean girls have other ideas and they fill Nick’s head with lies about Hadley, sending him running back to his ex-girlfriend and leaving Hadley heartbroken.
So when her parents decide to relocate to Grand Haven, Hadley hopes things will change when school starts…only to be disappointed once again.
Cliques. Back-stabbing. Love gone bad.
Is this really what it’s like to live…Next Door To A Star?
Book trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nnLXsu2c43k
Book trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nnLXsu2c43k
Excerpt from Next Door to a Star
“Hadley, did you see the new Celebrity Snooper blog today?” Aunt Faith asked. “Simone is in it with
Lauren Gere.”
“What? She didn’t say anything about that. Werethese super old pictures?”
“Here,” she said. “I’ll pull it up on my phone. It’s Simone and Lauren walking along the boardwalk with some blonde girl and a boy.”
“Does it say when that happened?” I asked. I couldn’t believe Simone wouldn’t have mentioned
Lauren had already been here.
Faith found the site on her phone and stared at it. “I’m not sure, but I guess it was pretty recent. Here,
look.”
Simone was on the phone in the picture and the blonde girl with them was Morgan. But what was worse was that the boy was Nick and Lauren had her hand on his arm. Great, it was probably the same night I called Simone and she was too busy to talk. Maybe I was the one on the other end of the phone in the stupid picture. I had missed my chance to meet Lauren, and Simone never even told me when she was in town. I guess I wasn’t cool enough for her to admit she was friends with me to somebody like Lauren. Who was I kidding? A TV star wanting to hang out with me? We weren’t friends at all. I was somebody she ran to when she needed something. And Nick was probably humoring me until his new celebrity girlfriend called him back. I wanted to throw up all over the table.
Excerpt #2
Charlotte called later and asked if I wanted to go with her to the party tomorrow .I went to put on my fake tan and imagined myself walking into the party looking all tan and gorgeous, and everyone would be wondering who I was and why they hadn’t asked me to hang out with them before. Connor and Lucas would want my phone number, Nick would be begging me to go out with him, Simone would realize I was cool, and Morgan would want to be my friend.
Then reality set in. First, the fake tan squirted out of the bottle all gooey. I rubbed the cold cream all over my arms and legs and put a little on my face. Simone had said you had to wash your hands well or it would stain your palms. I wasn’t sure how to put the tanning stuff on the back of my hands without getting it on my palms and drying, so I decided not to put any on my hands at all. I sat on some paper towels so I wouldn’t get any brown stuff on my bed, but it seemed to dry fast.
I woke up the next morning and I was definitely darker. My face was kind of orange, but my arms and legs had streaks on them. It was like somebody had burned me with a curling iron. Plus, my hands looked like I had white gloves on compared to the rest of me. I couldn’t go to the party all streaky.
People would make fun of me. I thought about putting the tanning stuff on all the lighter places on my body, but then it might look like I had a disease.
I ended up wearing a long sleeved shirt and jeans to the party. Charlotte had on a t-shirt and shorts when she came to pick me up.
“Aren’t you hot wearing all that?” she asked.
“I want to be covered for the mosquitoes,” I said. “Malaria is nothing to mess around with.”
I wasn’t the only one wearing jeans at the party, but I felt like I was dressed for a winter carnival when I saw Morgan and Pilar. Pilar had a deep pink halter top on with tiny jean shorts, and she had put some shimmery stuff all over her arms and legs. Morgan was wearing a blue crocheted tank top, and she would have passed for at least seventeen. She had her curly blonde hair down for a change, and all the guys were sitting around her.
“She’s so fake-looking,” Charlotte said as we watched Morgan and Lucas dance.
Morgan seemed so confident as she moved her hips. I wouldn’t be able to dance so free even if I was alone in my own bedroom. I was glad I had worn jeans because I would have seemed like a skinny kid next to Morgan’s muscular legs.
Bio: Krysten Lindsay Hager is an obsessive reader and has never met a bookstore she didn’t like. She’s worked as a journalist and humor essayist, and writes for teens, tweens, and adults. She is the author of the Landry’s True Colors Series and the new Star Series and her work has been featured in USA Today and named as Amazon’s #1 Hot New Releases in Teen & Young Adult Values and Virtues Fiction and Amazon’s #1 Hot New Releases in Children’s Books on Values. Krysten writes about friendship, self-esteem, fitting in, middle school and high school, frenemies, modeling, crushes, values, and self-image in True Colors and Best Friends…Forever? as well as in, Next Door to a Star. The sequel to Next Door to a Star (Competing with the Star: Star Series: Book 2) will be out March 22nd and the 3rd book in the Landry’s True Colors Series (Landry in Like: Book 3) will be out January 12th.
She is originally from Michigan and has lived in Portugal, South Dakota, and currently resides in southwestern Ohio where you can find her reading and writing when she’s not catching up on her favorite shows. She received her master’s degree from the University of Michigan-Flint.
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