WALKING NAKED

Megan Tuw and her friends are "smart, funny, pretty: everything you could want to be," but when Megan ends up in detention with the high school pariah, Perdita Wiguiggan, she begins to learn that the Freak has something the members of her clique lack. While their surreptitious friendship widens narrator Megan's limited perspective (poetry-obsessed Perdita takes her to a university course and to her abusive home), it also creates escalating tension between Megan and her girlfriends. Though the plot is fairly predictable, Australian author Brugman (here making her U.S. debut) does create a realistic, and chilling, peer group (Megan's friends hold "interventions" to keep one another in line over matters as trivial as hairstyle, and organize a "freedom of expression" protest when an older boy is arrested for streaking). Readers will also appreciate that Perdita is not just misunderstood, but truly weird ("Keep your breath to cool your porridge, Kitty," she says when Megan tries to explain why they can't hang out at school). Though the friendship between the two never quite reaches the same level of realism, readers will empathize with Perdita, and with Megan when she is ultimately forced to choose. Into the plot, the author weaves poems, including works by William Blake and Sylvia Plath, as well as some discussion of poetry, giving her misfit character depth and putting more ambitious work within her readers' grasp. Ages 12-up. (Mar.)