Love & Resistance, by Kara H. L. Chen

Combining Olivia's love of history and political science with her shrewd observations about high school cliques and her struggles for popularity (or at least acceptance), Love & Resistance imagines a secret society of nerds.  The so-called NerdNet plot a revolution to overthrow the social hierarchy of their school.  Dominated by popular social influencer Mitzi, Plainfield High is portrayed as a totalitarian dictatorship, in which a small power elite brutally suppress all forms of dissent.  Olivia wants to change that and she and her group (with some help from the drama club and the local poetry scene) try to wrest control and rebuild a more egalitarian school.  

None of this plays out realistically, but it's a whole lot of fun and all in service to a good cause:  addressing bullying and racism.  At first, Olivia and her friends are all focused on getting revenge and striking back, but as those strategies largely fail, they make the important realization that the best way to confront power is to render it irrelevant.  A society based on fear and conformity can't survive when its values are ignored.  Chen never draws the analogy out to anything greater than Olivia's school, but the novel's epilogue all but connects the dots to a challenge to our larger society.

The character building seemed weak to me and the love stories lacked much fizz, but I enjoyed the story --in the beginning because it was fun and then in the end because it had a lot of useful advice for young people who find themselves too wrapped up in social media and trying to please everyone around them.