Review by Booklist Review
Mendelsohn's novels, including I Was Amelia Earhart (1996), are distinguished by their vivid visualizations of mental states and delight in confusing the imagined with the real. Here she depicts the convulsive coming-of-age of a privileged New York teenager called Beckett, whose mother was killed by a drunk driver. Her father enrolls her in a fancy private school infamous for student suicides, then he falls in love with Pamela, the sexy school nurse. Beckett's first menstrual period hits her as hard as the vehicle that killed her mother, and once her father and Pamela decide to get married, her world turns nightmarish. Her stepmother-to-be morphs into a blood-sucking monster right out of a B horror movie, and Beckett, who sees herself reflected everywhere she looks, from mirrors to television and computer screens, fears for her life. Mendelsohn uses this obsession with appearance to dramatize the toll our image-saturated culture exacts from the young and sensitive. But she, too, is seduced by surface gloss and fails to go beyond the seductive beauty and cleverness of her narrative to achieve genuine emotion, let alone catharsis. --Donna Seaman
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Library Journal Review
Adolescence is a tough time for most people, and it is especially hard for 14-year-old Beckett, whose mother was killed in a drunk-driving accident in the suburbs. After the accident, her father, Miles, decides to move to an apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, enrolling Beckett in an exclusive private school. Strange things are happening at this schoolDseveral girls have formed suicide pacts, and three girls kill themselves shortly after Beckett begins school. It is through these events that Beckett meets Pam, the school nurse, who begins dating Miles and eventually becomes Beckett's new stepmother. Part modern Gothic, the novel flows along in a stream-of-consciousness narrative that reveals Beckett's inner turmoil. We also learn that all is not as it seems with Pam and the strange events at school. The book offers an interesting spin on the traditional coming-of-age story as it keeps the reader wondering, Is this fantasy or is this reality? Suitable for adults, this second novel by the author of I Was Amelia Earhart might also appeal to a mature young adult reader. Recommended for public libraries. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 5/1/00.]DRobin Nesbitt, Columbus Metropolitan Lib., OH (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Growing up in Manhattan can be hell, especially if you're the haunted heroine of this scary, tricky neo-gothic thriller. It's bad enough that Rebecca Warner's mother was killed by a drunk driver. But when her father decided to move back to the city with his daughter, he promptly fell for Pamela Reeve, Beckett's school nurse, and now everything is one long nightmare. Or rather a series of short, MTV-style nightmares in which the murders of three new school friends are indistinguishable from the onset of Beckett's first period, and the melted chocolate ice cream in the family freezer just might be frozen blood. Is Beckett hallucinating because her imagination has been sent spiraling into overdrive by the pills Pamela is constantly popping into her? Or is Pamela really a vampire whose life depends on a diet of virgins' menstrual blood? Is Beckett's waking nightmare, which she keeps plangently insisting is true, a train of once-in-a-lifetime coincidences (on his way over to spend the night with her, and perhaps save her life by deflowering her, her boyfriend Tobey is beaten so savagely in a restroom that he sinks into a coma)--or the result of a fiendish conspiracy between her father, her stepmother, and her psychiatrist--or an anthology of metaphors for a normal American coming-of-age in the infant century? Invoking a battery of analogues favoring the pop-culture heroines of Alice in Wonderland, The Wizard of Oz, Lolita, and Halloween, Mendelsohn (I Was Amelia Earhart, 1996) isolates her plucky heroine so fearfully via sparse paragraphs and an underpeopled world that even the most preposterous threats leap out of the movie frame to fuel a shriek of pure paranoia. Must reading for anybody who thinks teenagers today have gotten bloated with entitlement: a scarlet will-o'-the-wisp fantasy in which adults and adulthood aren't stupid stiffs but agents of unimaginable evil. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Review by Booklist Review
Review by Library Journal Review
Review by Kirkus Book Review
