Two or Three Things I Forgot to Tell You

Starred review from October 22, 2012
Merissa is the envy of all her similarly privileged peers, yet she also lost her friend Tink six months ago to suicide. While good things fall into place for Merissa (getting into a great college early, for one), neither she nor her friends can shake the loss of complex, audacious Tink, making her a significant influence even in death. Switching perspectives from Merissa to a collective "we" and then to the POV of a troubled girl named Nadia, Oates deftly conveys the ways teenage girls sometimes hide behind superficialities to disguise grief, insecurity, and fearâand how adults often do just the same. Oates creates an uncomfortable disconnect between characters' public actions and their thoughts and behavior behind closed doors. The formal prose style borders on stiff, with occasional use of outdated expressions (such as "bimbo"), but Merissa's desperation and longing for a sense of control is powerfully conveyed through her cutting and relentless self-effacement. The examination of teenage isolation, humiliation, and quiet suffering make this a painful, but excellent novel filled with haunting details. Ages 14âup.

Starred review from July 15, 2012
At the heart of Oates' riveting and poignant story of three teenage girls in crisis is the notion that a "secret can be too toxic to expose to a friend." In part one, it's mid-December of their senior year at Quaker Heights Day School, a prep school in an affluent New Jersey suburb. Merissa, "The Perfect One," has just been accepted early admission at Brown, with more good news to come. When she desperately needs a release--from the pressures to succeed, hypocrisy and her parents' disintegrating marriage--she secretly embraces cutting. Part two flashes back to 15 months earlier, when smart, funny, edgy, unpredictable Tink, a former child star, transfers into their junior class and changes everything. Part three picks back up in the winter of their senior year and focuses on Nadia, who falls prey to sexts and cyberbullying. Tink's suicide is revealed early on, and yet she remains a believable and critical touchstone for Merissa and Nadia, part of the girls of Tink Inc. The author is a master at portraying the complex, emotional inner lives of these teens, and their contemporary adolescent voices and perceptions (and misperceptions) ring true. The psychological dramas, though numerous, are deftly handled. What appears at first to be a bleak worldview does in fact make room for healing, change and standing up for what's right. Intense, keenly insightful, nuanced and affecting. (Fiction. 14 & up)

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October 1, 2012

Gr 8 Up-Katrina Olivia Traumer, known to everyone as Tink, entered the lives of the students at Quaker Heights Day School in their junior year, but by the next year she was gone, dead. Merissa, Hannah, Chloe, and Nadia do not understand why she took her own life. Each girl has a secret that she doesn't want to share: perfect Merissa cuts herself and "slut" Nadia is in love with one of their teachers. Was Tink really dying of leukemia, or was there some other horrifying event that caused her to end her life? Just like her friends, readers never learn her true secret. This is a hard story to read. The girls are not very likable, and they aren't very nice to one another. They live in an affluent New Jersey suburb of New York City and attend an exclusive private school. They are privileged but also extremely whiny. As the book opens, readers find out that Merissa has been accepted early decision to Brown University. This is a quite a coup, but she is miserable. There is some drinking and sexual content. Jay Asher's Thirteen Reasons Why (Penguin, 2007) or Patricia McCormick's Cut (Front Street, 2000) address the issues of suicide and cutting much more effectively.-Elizabeth Kahn, Patrick F. Taylor Science & Technology Academy, Jefferson, LA

Copyright 2012 School Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

May 1, 2012
Grades 9-12 It's been months since Tink d**d. Her d***h is something her friends only refer to obliquely because the droll, bipolar, former child star who had come into their lives so suddenlyairdropped into the school by her actress motherhas taken her own life. In separate sections, Oates tells the dreamy, twining stories of three of the friends: Merissa, whose early acceptance into Brown solidifies her status as the perfect one, though she has taken to cutting herself in private; Tink, whose story is told in the plural group voice of the girls, who loved how Tink made them feel so alive, even though they knew little about her; and Nadia, an innocent whose crush on a teacher leads to dangerous cyberbullying. Suicide, meanwhile, looms around the edges of every tale. Yes, these are problem-novel concepts, but in Oates' hands they become realism itself: a fast pastiche that is as much a triptych of pain as a reminder of resilience. While the whole does lack some cohesion, so do these girls' lives.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)