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Rosebush
Michele Jaffe

Razorbill /Penguin Group
December 2010/ ISBN 978-1-59514-353-2
Fiction /Young adult
Amazon

Reviewed by Cyndi Wright

This thriller/suspense novel can be a page-turner at times, but occasionally gets bogged down in detail. The characters, mainly a bunch of spoiled, rich, bad girls are hard to like. Even the heroine, Jane, although sympathetic at times, is a turn-off when she is verbally abusive to her mother. The book begins with Jane finding herself broken and battered in the hospitaland questioning her own sanity, as well as trying to figure out who tried to kill her.

Jane’s insecurities, spurred by the early death of her beloved father, drive her to deny her own self worth in the search for popularity. Early on, her best friend, Bonnie, is the voice of reason, but Jane takes no heed and that voice is silenced. After she moves to a new school, she is taken in by Langley and Kate, girls who are so far out of her league that she should have been questioning why they were interested in her a little more closely.

Regardless, Jane jumps into being part of the popular crowd and hangs her hat on a shallow, hunky, and possibly abusive boyfriend while trying to ignore the niggling voice inside that questions her own motives, as well as those of whom she calls friends. A side story is her mother’s engagement to a man Jane cannot stand.
The story will enthrall young readers, however, there is almost too much going on – with Jane’s life being threatened (maybe) by a friend, and a good-looking, but scary, stalker thrown in for good measure. The plot twists and turns as the reader finds out that Jane is not the only girl in the threesome who really doesn’t belong there. Credibility gets stretched to the limit at the end, when the reader finds out that many of those people Jane thought were friends are actually sociopaths. There just couldn’t be that many seriously messed up people in one girl’s life, could there?

The sexual content is fairly explicit at times and includes straight as well as gay sex.

Reviewer's Note:Sexually explicit

Reviewed 2011
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