Waiting On Wednesday: Rival by Sara Bennett Wealer

Waiting on Wednesday is a weekly meme hosted by Breaking the Spine to spotlight new and upcoming book releases. 

What if your worst enemy turned out to be the best friend you ever had?

Meet Brooke: Popular, powerful and hating every minute of it, she’s the “It” girl at Douglas High in Lake Champion, Minnesota. Her real ambition? Using her operatic mezzo as a ticket back to NYC, where her family lived before her dad ran off with an up and coming male movie star.

Now meet Kathryn: An overachieving soprano with an underachieving savings account, she’s been a leper ever since Brooke punched her at a party junior year. For Kath, music is the key to a much-needed college scholarship.

The stage is set for a high-stakes duet between the two seniors as they prepare for the prestigious Blackmore competition. Brooke and Kathryn work toward the Blackmore with eyes not just on first prize but on one another, each still stinging from a past that started with friendship and ended in betrayal. With competition day nearing, Brooke dreams of escaping the in-crowd for life as a professional singer, but her scheming BFF Chloe has other plans. And when Kathryn gets an unlikely invitation to Homecoming, she suspects Brooke of trying to sabotage her with one last public humiliation.

As pressures mount, Brooke starts to sense that the person she hates most might just be the best friend she ever had. But Kathryn has a decision to make. Can she forgive? Or are some rivalries for life? - from Goodreads

Rival by Sara Bennett Wealer
Publish Date: February 15, 2011
Pages: 336
Genre: realistic fiction
Audience: YA

I can't WAIT to read this one!  I love books that have musical settings.  From the musical background of Mia and her family in If I Stay, to the prominence music plays in helping Nathaniel Ayers in The Soloist, stories that revolve around music or involve characters that are musically inclined always catch my attention.  Of course, the fact that I played classical piano for thirteen years might have something to do with that.