Sophie awakes in utter fear. She is in the woods & blood is everywhere. Her best friend Mina is beside her -- bleeding, choking, gasping, dying. The flashback of a masked man stepping out of a car, pointing a gun, and shooting her dearest friend pounds in her head. In the hospital the shock is over powering & at home the reality is too much to bear. Who would kill Mina? Why had Mina driven down the wooded road? Why hadn't Sophie asked more questions? Did the masked man really say, "I warned you?Sophie tries to piece the details together.
The Sinclairs spend every summer on their private island, Beechwood. Born within a few short months of each other, 3 of the Sinclair grandchildren and one friend of the family spend the summers thick as thieves, calling themselves The Liars. Cadence, Johnny, Mirren and Gat are inseparable every year, but the summer of their fifteenth year, things start to change. Cadence begins to fall in love with Gat (a friend of the family who is invited to Beechwood every summer) while the Sinclair family falls apart around them.
Amy Gumm wants to get the hell out of Kansas. She is sick and tired of being mocked at school for her worn out clothes and trailer trash mom. After getting kicked out of school for getting into a fight with a pregnant girl (a fight that Amy did NOT start she would like me to point out), she comes home to find her mother out of her usual funk and primping for an evening at the local dive bar. The news on the TV in the living room shows radar towards Dusty Acres (their luxurious trailer park).
In the very near future, Trent McCauley is a 16-year-old in northern England who makes videos by cutting, pasting, and editing movies starring a dead actor he's obsessed with. This isn't just a hobby of Trent's, it's his passion (much like writing Simon Snow fanfic is a passion for Cath in Rainbow Rowell's Fangirl). But it violates copyright and pirating laws, which is why the state cuts off his family's internet access for a year.
Blue lives in a family of psychics, but the only power she has is amplifying the abilities of others. On All Hallow's Eve, she visits the Corpse Road with her aunt. There, her aunt sees the ghosts of everyone in Henrietta who will die in the next year. For the first time, Blue is able to see a ghost. It's a boy about her age. When she asks his name, he says, "Gansy, that's all there is." Her aunt tells her the only way she would be able to see the ghost is if he is her true love, or if she killed him. Possibly both.
Jordan Romero was fascinated by a poster in his elementary school of the Seven Summits, the highest mountain peaks on each of the seven continents. When he was nine years old, he announced to his parents that he wanted to climb the Seven Summits and he wanted to start training immediately. Jordan was familiar with what training involved; his father and stepmother were adventure racers.
I am generous with 4 star ratings, but I don't give out a lot of 5 stars; I reserve those for the most exceptional books. This was an exceptional book!
Another beautiful, intelligent, sensitive teenager has killed her self. The media blames the bullies at Emma Putnam's new school that refused to accept her, that kept her on the fringe. The used words like slut and whore, they left notes and signs on her locker, they found her on social media...they drove her to suicide.
When I was in elementary school, I read many, many books on monsters and the paranormal. Books about ghosts, UFOs, Bigfoot, the Loch Ness Monster, mummies, werewolves...and vampires. Outside of books, there wasn't a lot to see with vampires at the time. You might catch classic Universal monster movies or the later, bloodier Hammer horror movies on late night TV (assuming you could convince your parents to let you stay up that late).
If you knew the precise time the moon would collide with a meteor would you pull out your binoculars, pop some popcorn, and pull up a lawn chair for the best show of your life? If you knew the moon would be struck quickly by the meteor but then slowly move closer and closer to the earth would you fear for you life? If you knew the moon's imposing presence in the sky would produce deadly earthquakes, tsunamis, and volcanoes that wipe out millions of people would you still have hope? If you knew the middle of summer would soon turn to a blistering winter would you survive?
