Book review: Dear Pen Pal by Heather Vogel Frederick

The seventy-fourth book I read in 2017 was the third installment in Heather Vogel Frederick's The Mother-Daughter Book Club series, Dear Pen Pal.  This year, the girls and moms are reading Daddy-Long-Legs, so Emma's mom contacts her college roommate in Wyoming who is naturally enough running a five-member mother-daughter book club of her own and pairs each girl up with a pen pal for the year. 

Another parallel with the classic is that Jess is contacted out of the blue by a private girls' boarding school she never applied to and told she has been awarded a scholarship for eighth grade.  Jess and her family are notified of this award on Labor Day weekend.  Despite that fact that the school is in her home town, she moves into the dormitory and has to live with a stuck-up roommate who is the daughter of a U.S. senator.  Sweet Valley, I'm telling you. 

Megan's grandmother from China moves to America to live with her family; Cassidy's mother has a baby with her new husband; Jess's mysterious benefactor is finally revealed; and the whole troup flies out to Wyoming to meet their pen pals at the end of the year. 

Megan's grandmother Gigi is an interesting new character, but the best thing about this book was that it motivated me to read Daddy-Long-Legs.