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
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