The Great Lakeside High Experiment was a teenage paperback written back in 1982 by one Neil Selden, who is apparently a playwright, movie director, and life coach as well as an author.

The book mines the plain-girl-gets-a-makeover trope with a little more depth than usual. Maude Harris (yeah, he didn't pull any punches with that one) is our wallflower plain-jane and Jen is the stylish and popular lady who, along with her entourage (her boyfriend and another fella) take Maude under their wing to see if they can bring her out of her shell a bit. Of course, she gets the physical makeover, and both of the boys become enamored with her, and there is a falling out between her and Jen, and she runs away with a bad boy on a motorcycle and gets into a horrible crash. She is gravely injured and they all work out their differences by hospital bed. To be fair, it's not a perfectly happy ending where everyone is the best of friends again, and it depicts their pastimes and relationships in a much more realistic and sophisticated way than one usually finds in teen books.

It was later adapted as an ABC Afterschool Special entitled 'The Great Love Experiment' starring, among others, Esai Morales and Jennifer Grey, where "everyone learns a lesson about beauty and friendship."

There are certain odd similarities between this novel's protagonist and Laney Boggs, that of the 1999 teen movie, She's All That (besides the horrible makeover trope), who, for example, also lives with her younger brother and her father, who cleans pools for a living. Of all the things...

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