Devious

Overview

"Devious" continues Cecily von Ziegesar's It Girl series, a spinoff that transplants Jenny Humphrey, a familiar face from the author's "Gossip Girl" books, into the enclosed world of Waverly Academy. By this ninth installment, the boarding-school setting has become its own self-contained universe of dorm politics, shifting alliances, and status anxiety, distinct from but clearly descended from its parent series.

The plot turns on the arrival of a new semester and, with it, two new students: a brother and sister whose entrance immediately scrambles the campus's social hierarchy. The brother draws instant, breathless attention from the school's girls, while his sister proves to be a far more calculating presence, positioning herself as a genuine threat to the reigning social order that Jenny, Tinsley, and Callie have spent the series jockeying to control.

As with earlier books in the series, the story is less concerned with external stakes than with the internal currency of reputation, crushes, and rank. The new siblings function as a catalyst, forcing the existing cast to reveal how far they'll go to protect their standing.

A Franchise Built on Reinvention and Rank

The It Girl series exists in an unusual position within young adult publishing: a spinoff engineered to extend a successful media property (Gossip Girl) by relocating one of its supporting characters and giving her center stage. That origin shapes much of what the books are "about." Jenny's arc across the series is fundamentally one of reinvention, an attempt to shed a former identity and construct a new one in a setting where reputation is both currency and weapon.

Boarding-school fiction has long used the closed campus as a pressure cooker for testing social hierarchies away from parental oversight, and the It Girl books lean into that tradition, using titles like "Devious" to signal the genre's fascination with scheming, image management, and the precariousness of popularity. The series was received, at the time of its publication, as part of a broader wave of glossy, plot-driven teen fiction aimed at readers who had grown up on the "Gossip Girl" novels and television adaptation, prized more for its brisk pacing and soap-opera momentum than for literary ambition. Within von Ziegesar's body of work, "Devious" represents a fairly typical entry: it neither departs from nor substantially deepens the series' established formula of romantic entanglement, social maneuvering, and cliffhanger plotting.

Why Devious Has Been Challenged

Most objections to the book center on its suitability for the middle-school-aged readers who make up a significant share of the series' audience, given that the It Girl books are frequently shelved alongside other tween and early-teen fiction. Critics argue that the content skews older than that audience can appropriately handle, pointing to the series' recurring depictions of teen drinking, casual sexual references, and a general preoccupation with romantic and physical pursuit among high-school-age characters. The concern typically isn't a single scene but a cumulative one: that the books normalize behavior parents and educators consider premature for the readers most likely to pick them up based on age or reading level alone.

This particular title has drawn a formal challenge in one state and one district tracked in this catalog, consistent with concerns raised about other entries in the series and its Gossip Girl predecessor. The underlying complaint tends to be less about any singular passage than about the series' overall tone, which some reviewers and parents view as glamorizing status-seeking and precocious romantic behavior without much narrative pushback or consequence.