So, it's only fair that I start this review by admitting my biases... 
 1. I had no idea that this was the 2nd book in a series, which obviously means that I never read the first book before starting The Pretty App. 
 2. I read The Pretty App in the middle of a Lifetime movie binge, which included the one about the five bitchy cheerleaders who ran the school and made everyone's lives hell, along with loads of commercials about a show the featured a reality TV show that was heavily rigged for ratings. So, if I have a tendency to think that The Pretty App read as a mix between the bitchy cheerleader movie and the weird reality TV, it may be because I'm hooked on Lifetime --- but, then again, it may just be true. 
 When I started The Pretty App, I actually threw the book aside several times before getting past the first few chapters. Blake Dawkins was such an exaggeration of the whole "mean girls" stereotype that I couldn't see myself getting very far with this one. I mean, page after page of Blake describing how perfect and beautiful she is -- and how everyone dreamed of having her hair and her waist and her breasts -- yeah, OVER IT! 
 But, I trudged through the mess and soon came to see that the character intentionally depicted herself as the queen bee of the mean girl bitches in order to hide her insecurities and to maintain her position at the top of the social ladder, because of course she has daddy issues that have left her convinced that her dazzling good looks are her only available asset. Okay, so we might get some character development from this one... maybe... 
 Basically, the plot is that a hugely popular app has been recently released from a sketchy corporation with the intention of locating the most beautiful high school girls in the country, who will compete on a reality TV show for the title of "the nation's prettiest" (and will then fulfill some ambassador type of good-will role as part of the prize). Blake is convinced that she will win -- and once she's actually chosen for the show, she begins to suspect that her placement is part of a scheme that actually has little to do with her beauty at all. 
 Unfortunately, most of the book is really just incredibly predictable. It's not hard to guess why Blake was chosen, who would benefit from the selection, and what role the handsome new guy at school plays in the whole mess. While I can't deny that parts of the story were pretty entertaining -- and I expect that the book might be more enjoyable with the backstory of Blake's former best friend and of the general sketchiness of the business in question (both of which seem to have been the focus of the first book), I overall wasn't incredibly impressed by this story. 
 Don't get me wrong -- it wasn't a bad book. I can imagine that fans of the first one in the series might enjoy it more than someone like me, who wandered into book 2 without any knowledge of the preceding storyline. And, I'm sure there's an audience for this book -- one, I suspect, that is probably quite a bit younger than I am. 
 At some point, I may go back and read The Boyfriend App, just to see what I'm missing. 
 But, with so many enticing options in my giant TBR pile, I can't imagine that it will really be anytime that soon.