The writing is lyrical, and despite being critically dull, there was just enough mystery to keep me reading until the end, so I’ll give it two stars. This book was strange, because it was not very deep (there was only one plot, and the ending was garbage) and it felt like it should have been a young adult novel, but the nonstop sexual creepiness of the father and brother as well as the author’s inability to know basic things about teenagers (no phone has ever made you hit “refresh” to get new text messages, for starters) forced me to put it in my adult shelf.

My biggest problem with this book is I didn’t feel much about anything. The father and brother were creepy, and Deenie was slow-witted and had bad taste in friends, and I couldn’t find myself caring about any of them. There were tons of monologues about life being hard and growing up being hard that it got to the point where I wanted to shake all these characters and tell them to get over themselves.

If you want to know what happened, I’ll save you the trouble of reading it:

Spoiler

Lise was poisoned by Gabby because Gabby thought Lise hooked up with the boy she liked (Lise did not). The other sick girls got sick because, a la The Crucible, which is not so subtly referenced in the book, they were all so obsessed with Gabby that they experienced psychological episodes that made them sick. Yeah, I’m rolling my eyes too.