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Summary
Summary
"[A] perfectly orchestrated girl-who-cried-wolf thriller."--The New York Times Book Review
A dark, utterly compulsive novel about what happens when the warped imagination of a teenage girl turns into reality...
When fifteen-year-old Yasmin--obese, obsessive and deemed a freak by her peers--sees a sinister man watching Alice Taylor from the school fence, she becomes convinced he's planning to take her. After all, who wouldn't want the popular and perfect Alice?
Then Yasmin realizes if she can find out who he is before he acts, she'll be the only one who can tell the police, save Alice and become Alice's heroine. But as Yasmin discovers more about this man, her affections begin to shift. Perhaps she was wrong about him. Perhaps she doesn't need Alice after all...
And then Alice vanishes.
Reviews (7)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Yasmin is an overweight 15-year-old with no friends, missing her dad who died five years ago, stuck living with her mom and her loser judgmental stepfather, Gary, in a nondescript U.K. suburb, and obsessed with Alice Taylor, one of the popular girls in her class who barely gives her the time of day. But from the get-go, the wildly clever Kavanagh, in her spectacular adult-novel debut, launches a new obsession for Yasmin: a strange man standing at the edge of the school property who appears to be as drawn to Alice as she is. Yasmin is certain he is going to kidnap Alice (she even Googles "how to spot a pedophile"), and that notion inspires a series of fantasies in which Yasmin heroically saves Alice and they become best friends forever. The canny Yasmin insinuates herself into the stalker's life so that she can identify him to the police if he goes through with the horrible deed. Things get complicated when he turns out to be the first person in her adolescent life who doesn't mock her or treat her with disdain, and they get even more complicated when Alice actually disappears, and Yasmin's stepfather is a suspect. The ensuing events and the stunning conclusion underscore the author's searing insight into teenage behavior and the desperation for connection. (Jan.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
The kids at school call Yasmin an obese freak, but she knows she shares an unsaid connection with cool-girl Alice. When Yasmin sees a man leering at Alice, she imagines him abducting her, giving Yasmin the perfect opportunity to save the girl she so admires! To thwart his plot, Yasmin befriends him, which, surprisingly, satisfies her craving for camaraderie. But when Alice actually does go missing, Yasmin is in a quandary: Should she report the man she suspects is responsible or protect the only friend she's ever had? Written in the second person and addressed to the man obsessed with Alice, Yasmin is an unreliable narrator in the most intriguing way. She lies and can't read social cues, and her yearning to belong and distorted sense of logic feel genuine. Despite Yasmin's delusions and stalkerish tendencies, readers will feel sympathy for how Yasmin believes that one person's approval will solve all her other problems. The dark subject matter, particularly Alice's life-or-death situation, looms on every page, yet Kavanagh's novel manages to be a quick, thoroughly enjoyable read.--Hyzy, Biz Copyright 2016 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
The protagonist of this perfectly orchestrated girl-who-cried-wolf thriller is an obese 15-year-old "Star Trek" fan named Yasmin, ostracized by her peers and obsessed with a pretty classmate named Alice, whose sweat socks and throwaway snack wrappings she hoards in a box. Like her mother, who earns a living catching supermarket workers sloughing off on the job, Yasmin doesn't miss a trick. After observing an older man taking suspicious interest in Alice, she convinces herself that he's plotting to kidnap the object of her infatuation. Playing out her rescue fantasies, she resolves to stalk the stalker, wreaking havoc in the process. Kavanagh's second-person narration gives voice to Yasmin's tumultuous inner life. The beauty of this confessional technique is the way it reveals the very thin line that separates garden-variety teenage agita from dangerous delusion. While the author gives us plenty of reasons to sympathize with the persecuted Yasmin, the artfulness with which she deceives and manipulates is so downright creepy that one periodically finds oneself in the discomfiting posture of cheering on the bullies and the mean girls.
School Library Journal Review
Published in Great Britain in 2015, this suspense novel will surprise readers. Yasmin, a depressed 15-year-old, is still recovering from her father's death years ago while obsessing over Alice, her school's "it" girl. Yasmin is bullied by classmates and teachers, but her mom and stepfather are more concerned with getting her to lose weight than with her mental health. When Yasmin notices a man who "only [has] eyes for Alice," she, too, becomes determined to stalk Alice in order to protect her and be seen as a hero. Yasmin is an unreliable first-person narrator who lives in a fantasy world; periodically, she addresses the stalker through second-person narration. Readers will find themselves thoroughly confused and questioning what's actually happening until they reach the last sentence. The anticipation and tension that mount as Alice disappears are exhausting-who kidnapped Alice? Is Yasmin involved, or is she a victim? VERDICT Like E. Lockhart's We Were Liars, this title will have its champions. Whether teens love it or hate it, it will nevertheless spark discussion and elicit strong feelings. Purchase where twisted reads are popular.-Sarah Hill, Lake Land College, Mattoon, IL © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Guardian Review
The Good Girl by Fiona Neill; Things We Have in Common by Tasha Kavanagh; The Infidel Stain by MJ Carter; Death Is a Welcome Guest by Louise Welsh; Edith's Diary, The Blunderer, Deep Water and The Tremor of Forgery by Patricia Highsmith The latest novel from Fiona Neill, best known for her Slummy Mummy columns, is The Good Girl (Michael Joseph, [pound]7.99), a stark morality tale about the perils of sexting. When a video showing 17-year-old student Romy giving her boyfriend a blow job goes viral, the ramifications are grimly easy to imagine. But Neill leaves the aftermath till the end, beginning instead with the months leading up to the incident -- a period of domestic strife for Romy's family, culminating in a move to the country that was supposed to restore order, and might well have done had their new neighbours not been sex therapists Wolf and Loveday. The Good Girl is vivid and insightful, and Neill has a trained eye for the pressures and poignancies of modern family life. But even allowing for the fact that she has clever parents, Romy is impossibly intellectually sophisticated for her age. And her parents' professions (father a neuroscientist writing a book about impulse and the teenage brain, mother the head of the secondary school Romy and her siblings attend) have clearly been chosen for their symbolic value. Of course, you could say the same about the characters in Howards End. But no one in Howards End spouts dialogue like this: "Don't you realise that the release of cortisol under stress means that the amygdala imprints memories that have a strong emotional charge?" Less ambitious but more effective is Tasha Kavanagh's pitch-black comedy thriller Things We Have in Common (Canongate, [pound]12.99), also set partly in a school and with bullying as a theme. Here the victim is compulsive eater Yasmin, a half-Turkish girl who falls in love with the blond and aloof Alice, one of the "cool" girls in her class. Yasmin, whose life at home is miserable following the death of her father and her mother's remarriage, becomes obsessed with the idea that Alice is about to be abducted by a man she sees walking his dog. Stronger than her urge to protect Alice, however, is her greedy awareness that she and the man, who is possibly a paedophile, want the same thing. This is a novel you read half covering your eyes, willing it not to venture where you fear it might. But of course it does, with great panache. Kavanagh gets Yasmin's sulky-needy voice just right, so that her warped hunger for power and attention is shown in an ultimately sympathetic context. MJ Carter's The Infidel Stain (Fig Tree, [pound]14.99) brings back Jeremiah Blake and William Avery, the stars of her India-set debut The Strangler Vine. Relocating the action to fog-and-cobblestones Victorian London, as Carter does here, is a dangerous move. In The Strangler Vine, Blake and Avery's fussy Holmes-and-Watson relationship was an incidental pleasure. This new setting brings the Sherlock connection to the foreground and risks diminishing it as we become overfamiliar with the dynamic of their relationship. Still, this is another tremendous performance by Carter: its hallmarks are deep but unobtrusive research, prose that channels Conan Doyle with nimble precision, and a sense that she is genuinely engaging with history rather than using it as set-dressing. We encounter Chartism, suffrage reform and poverty, as Blake and Avery are commissioned by a philanthropic peer to investigate the murders of two dubious printers. The first novel in Louise Welsh's dystopian Plague Trilogy, A Lovely Way to Burn, imagined Britain in the grip of a killer flu pandemic known colloquially as "the sweats". Part two, Death Is a Welcome Guest (John Murray, [pound]14.99), shows us the same events from the perspective of up-and-coming Scottish standup Magnus McCall. Imprisoned on a false charge, McCall emerges from Pentonville to find the world collapsing; though it turns out he and his cellmate Jeb have stronger immune systems than most. Almost everything about this scenario is familiar, from the abandoned luxury hotels to the looped news bulletins on TV. (The internet has, well, broken -- a neat satirical touch.) But Welsh's writing is so effective that it was as if I were encountering these tropes for the first time; as if I was 12 again and watching Threads, the 1980s BBC nuclear drama to which this series is clearly indebted. Richly imagined and, in Welsh's hands, horribly plausible. Finally, and pleasingly, Virago has added four more Patricia Highsmith novels to its Modern Classics list: Edith's Diary, The Blunderer, Deep Water (Gillian Flynn's favourite Highsmith novel) and The Tremor of Forgery, about an American screenwriter stranded in Tunisia, which Graham Greene considered her finest work. Most people discover the Queen of Misanthropy via the Ripley novels, as they should, but as novelist Denise Mina points out in her introduction, "if you really want to wonder at Highsmith you have to read off-road". - John O'Connell.
Kirkus Review
A teenage outcast imagines what would happen if one of her classmates was abducted only to deal with confusing consequences when fantasy becomes reality in Kavanaghs debut novel.Catching a glimpse of a man across from her school one afternoon, Yasminlonely and overweightconstructs an imaginative abduction scenario. She assumes that, if he were indeed a murderer/pedophile, he would have his eyes on Alice, the most beautiful and popular girl in Yasmins class. Yasmin herself has a crush on Alice, and she's been keeping a box of souvenirs that represent times that their paths have inadvertently crosseda lost sock, a piece of snack wrapper left behind, a heart sketched on a slip of paper. Over the next several weeks, as she navigates a hostile school environment as well as her mother's and stepfathers disappointment that she wont keep to her diet, Yasmin begins to follow the man in question and even makes contact with him, drawn by his kindness toward her in return. When Alice really does go missing one evening, Yasmin has to decide whether she should go to the policeor has she completely misconstrued the situation? Its hard to be in Yasmins head sometimes; she is such a severely unhappy character that it makes for uncomfortable reading in the first-person. Its even hard to feel too much empathy for her, despite her history of loss, because she seems so bent on ignoring social cues as well as common sense. But Kavanagh does orchestrate some successful plot twists that are reminiscent of other psychological thrillersclassics by Ruth Rendell, for example, or more recent hits like Gone Girl. If you can stick with Yasmin until the end, the twists and turns are worth it. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Fifteen-year-old Yasmin is a major misfit: overweight, depressed, and shunned by her classmates. With her father dead and her mother remarried, Yasmin is uncomfortable in her own skin and feels like a visitor in her own home. One day she happens upon a man creepily watching popular girl Alice, the same classmate whom Yasmin has a crush on. She decides to befriend this stranger in the hopes of keeping him from harming Alice, with Yasmin becoming Alice's hero and friend as a result. But upon her initial meeting with awkward loner Samuel, Yasmin immediately recognizes a kindred spirit. This leads to her pursuing a friendship with him, to the point of forgetting her unspoken role as Alice's protector. Then Alice goes missing. While Kavanagh realistically portrays the misguided thoughts and actions of a troubled teen, her protagonist is an unreliable, selfish narrator who elicits no sympathy in the reader. VERDICT Touted as an adult thriller, this slow-moving debut definitely feels more YA. Despite its weaknesses, it is a surprisingly compulsory, if unpleasant, read. [See Prepub Alert, 7/18/16.]- Marianne Fitzgerald, Severna Park H.S., MD © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.