The Dare

June 15, 2014
After the death of her best friend, a high school girl is haunted by something: Whether it's conscience, ghost or merely human demons is unclear.When Brynna's best friend, Erica, drowns, Brynna-who dared Erica into the night swim that led to her death-becomes addicted to drugs and alcohol, culminating in a drunken driving arrest. Now in a new city and at a new school and seeing a court-appointed therapist, Brynna simply wants to skate through school unnoticed. Through no effort of her own, she's immediately sucked into a clique of gregarious classmates, finding herself with friends and a boyfriend, hopeful despite herself, a la Bella Swan. But Brynna keeps seeing Erica on street corners, reliving the drowning in dreams and receiving text messages from her dead friend. Is she losing her mind? Is someone from her old town tormenting her? Or worse, is one of her new friends the source of this torture? So tightly wound is Brynna's spiral into degenerating paranoia that the frankly ridiculous, scarcely foreshadowed reveal is barely a blip-her increasing terrors are believable and tension-racked. Her happy aftermath is less so, but nobody reads Cooney-style thrillers for the realistic resolution.Brynna's guilt-induced psychosis makes for a page-turner in the spirit of Lois Duncan's classic I Know What You Did Last Summer; it will undoubtedly please the thriller-loving crowd. (Thriller. 13-15)

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July 1, 2014

Gr 8 Up-Best friends Brynna and Erica did everything together. They swam on the school swim team together. They shopped together. They ate lunch together. They shared clothes. They even dared to jump off the pier at night together-but only Brynna got out of the water and Erica, whose body was never found, was pronounced dead. For the past 18 months the protagonist has struggled with guilt, drugs, and alcohol, but she's ready to make a fresh start at a new school for her junior year. No one knows about her past, so she should be able to slide under the radar-or so she thinks. But suddenly she starts getting tweets from Erica and menacing messages at school, and she is sure she sees Erica everywhere. Is she being haunted, or did Erica survive the dare and now wants revenge? The novel's premise promises goosebumps galore, but the execution delivers barely a shiver. Brynna isn't a particularly sympathetic character, despite her troubles. The adults in the book are either absent, clueless, or one-dimensional, and the friends Brynna makes at her new school are interchangable even though one is supposed to be a love interest and another reveals to Brynna that he's gay. Nothing here will make readers look nervously over their shoulders or jump when they get a text. Stick with Sara Shepard's "Pretty Little Liars" series (HarperCollins) and Lois Duncan's I Know What You Did Last Summer (Little, Brown, 1973).-Heather Webb, Worthington Libraries, OH

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