Dead Girls Society

Gr 8 Up—This is not your typical dying teenage girl story. Hope Callahan has cystic fibrosis and longs to be a normal high school student but is restrained by her overprotective mother. When Hope receives a mysterious email inviting her to participate in a game of dares, she is curious enough to sneak out to the midnight meeting, where she finds four other girls from school. Together, they are manipulated into taking part in a series of dangerous challenges. For the protagonist, it's a chance to win money to pay for her medical expenses. But after she nearly dies and her mother's car is blown up, she is determined to figure out who is running the game before somebody gets killed. The New Orleans-area location is an ideal setting for the intriguing narrative. Although the characters are stereotypical (the rich snob, the smart girl, the athlete, the bad girl, the best friend/secret crush), they develop as the story progresses. Hope is an admirable heroine, but it's difficult to believe that someone with chronically bad lungs could survive a bungee jump and the other physically exhausting feats she manages. There is also some confusion about what happened to a character. Did she commit suicide or die in a fire? Both scenarios are given as motivation for the person behind the dares. The neatly resolved ending seems to unravel in the last sentence of the book.