Sketchy Behavior

July 18, 2011
Sixteen-year-old Kate Carter sees her life as typical and unremarkable. Her days are filled with school, homework, and television viewing with her best friend, Maddy. Having sworn off dating after one disastrous experience, she has a pleasant, if perfunctory, relationship with her parents, and only the vaguest sense of who God might be. This all changes dramatically after her well-meaning art teacher introduces Kate and her classmates to forensic sketching. Before Kate knows it, her sketch of a notorious murderer is making headlines. As Kate loses her anonymity and her sense of security, she and her mother begin to seek spiritual solace at church, and soon Kate finds herself engrossed by the Psalms and Gospel of Luke. Additionally, Kate's world opens up beyond the confines of her friendship with Maddy, and she meets a boy who might even make her reconsider her dating ban. Though it is occasionally difficult to suspend disbelief, especially when a sketch artist gets such sustained celebrity treatment, Kate's wit and self-deprecation, combined with Mangum's entertaining take on the crime thriller genre, make for pleasurable reading. Ages 9â12.

August 15, 2011

Sixteen-year-old Kate Carter's life goes from normal to anything but when, for a school art assignment, she perfectly captures the face of a serial killer, a situation that both catapults her into fame and threatens her security.

Mangum's squeaky-clean thriller, aimed squarely at Christian girls, is narrated in the first person by a heroine trying very hard to be snarky, without success—she's just too nice. It's an up-and-down affair in both tone and substance, dull voids punctuated with unexpected action, some of which is nearly impossible to buy. After an intriguing set up, during which the savant sketch-artist heroine draws a serial killer so exactly that he's almost immediately recognized and caught, the story languishes until someone takes a potshot at Kate during a parade. It seems that the serial killer has at least one deadly friend in St. Louis County, a situation that raises the stakes for Kate and the people who surround her. It also causes her to reexamine her feelings about God and faith, a topic the author handles deftly and with a light hand, and sets the stage for a possible romantic friendship with a churchgoing boy.

The action-packed, sealed-with-a-twist ending strains credulity beyond the cracking point, but it finally engages the reader, who will likely close the book smiling. (Thriller. 12 & up)

(COPYRIGHT (2011) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

October 1, 2011

Gr 6-9-Kate Cater, 16, is unwittingly thrust into the middle of a murder investigation when a sketching assignment makes her the target of a serial killer. Kate's art teacher invites a local police officer into the classroom to talk about the career of a forensic artist and asks her students to give the occupation a try by sketching the portrait of a man currently wanted for murder. Kate's superior "practice" sketch is leaked to the media, along with her name, and she quickly becomes the murderer's new target. During her ordeal, Kate begins to question her faith as she ponders the role God plays in the big picture. The book's pacing is sometimes uneven; the story moves slowly when Kate is stuck at home with her bodyguards, but readers will fly through the scenes where the bad guys are pursuing her. Despite its occasional flaws, the novel is worth adding to collections in which there is strong reader demand for contemporary Christian fiction.-Lindsay Cesari, Baldwinsville School District, NY

Copyright 2011 School Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

November 1, 2011
Grades 7-10 Kate, 16, is a gifted artist. After a detective teaches her high-school art class the technique of forensic sketching, Kate's portrait of a serial killer on the run is posted everywhere and leads to the suspect's arrest. Suddenly, she is a local celebrityin her St. Louis neighborhood and in the press. The flip side, though, is that she is now in escalating mortal danger as the murderer's friends come after her, and two policemen are assigned to guard her 24/7 at both home and school. Along with the scary plot twists of a thriller, readers will enjoy Kate's wry, first-person narrative, which is refreshingly free of self-importance as she speaks about the techniques of criminal profiling and what it is like to be shadowed by detectives. Teens will connect with her everyday concerns (yes, she is famous, but what should she wear to the press conference?) as well as the larger questions: she is religious and prays, but where is God in all of this? Mangum builds the tension and secrets right to the last page.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2011, American Library Association.)