Point of View

How Not to Be Popular is written from the first-person perspective of Maggie in both the present and past tenses. Maggie has just moved from Portland, Oregon to Austin, Texas. And has vowed to not make any friends in Texas. Everything she does her first few weeks of school is to make it so that she is unpopular.

She has moved a lot in her previous three years of high school and does not want to be devastated by the moves anymore. Even though she's trying to find people that are dorks and losers so that the popular kids won't like her, she's finding that she likes the so-called dorks and losers that she's aligned herself with.

Many times a popular girl in the other high schools, now that she's not part of that crowd, she's seeing what it is like to be on the other...