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Yeah. That's how I found this...
The first sentence (Afterward--for the rest of her life, in fact--Julie Hagan would wonder at the suddenness of it.) automatically sends up a warning--most times, when a book starts out with clichéd foreshadowing, the event doesn't seem to equal the beginning.
But I read on. Nothing better to do.
Turns out, after a boring love story with the dumbest kids ever, you begin to wonder how anyone could be stupid enough to write this. The foreshadowing, as I said, dampens the following events. You can't keep the reader waiting for hours and then have the horrid, life-shattering event being Sarah forgot to call and invite the character to a party. Please.
And then, it was boring. Every bad plot rolled into one. We've read a million books with the physco boyfriend. They are all the exact same:
1) Tall, dark mysterious guy shows up
2) Girl, pretty, naive gets crush
ect. ect. ect.
And I've read Class Trip. That wasn't half bad. Four stars. Odd, that such a good author could write something this utterly stupid.
Hmmm.
Yet Quinn is completely uninterested in Tara. He wants Julie, and nobody will keep him from her either. That becomes perfectly clear at Tara's party when Quinn violently attacks two guys who had been harassing Julie. He claims he was only protecting her, but his jealousy and temper flare out of control time and time again. Soon there's not a minute that goes by that Quinn isn't either questioning Julie's loyalty or threatening any passerby that's male.
Then three seemingly unrelated deaths point directly to Quinn as a suspect. The first is the fatal "accident" of a fellow classmate who knew too much about Quinn's past. The second is a drug-related murder of the two boys at Tara's party.
But there's something even worse that haunts Quinn: the death of Alison Barry, the young girl he had killed four years ago--the girl who looks exactly like Julie. Now how far will Quinn go to recapture that same relationship, to keep Julie with him forever?
Julie, initially flattered by Quinn's attention, slowly comes to realize how dangerous he is. Quinn is at first seen as the "cool guy" on campus with a "mysterious" past. But Quinn has a "dark" side that he struggles to conceal from Julie and the rest of the world until he is pushed over the edge.
In addition to maintaining the suspense, Ms. Rice paints a scary (and at times funny) picture of a typical high school where students are obsessed with belonging to the right cliques, becoming part of the "in" crowd---as obsessed as Quinn is with Julie . . .
Be sure to read Bebe Faas Rice's other fine novels, which include THE YEAR THE WOLVES CAME, THE LISTENERS, AND MUSIC FROM THE DEAD.
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