Love Is the Drug

Gr 10 Up—Her mother calls her Emily, but she calls herself by her last name, Bird, and so does Alonso, known as Coffee, the strangely compelling drug-dealer and diplomat's son who attends Bird's private Washington, DC, school. When Bird wakes up after eight days in a coma to discover she was drugged at a party and left with no memory of what happened, she turns to Coffee for help—even though the authorities, including the mysterious Roosevelt, insist that he was the one who poisoned her. But Emily suspects that Roosevelt, her boyfriend Paul, and possibly even her scientist parents are involved in a conspiracy: a conspiracy that is connected to the Venezuelan flu, a virus planted by terrorists that is currently killing hundreds of thousand around the globe. The author of The Summer Prince (Scholastic, 2013) writes beautifully, but the convoluted premise can be tough to swallow, and the lyrical quality of her writing does not always mesh with the high-octane plot. The story is strongest when following Bird, a self-described "assimilated" DC black girl, as she tries to stay true to herself amid not only the terror of the quarantine, but also the restrictive expectations and assumptions of her family and classmates. Teens looking for a fast-paced tale with diverse characters will find it in Johnson's latest offering.—Eliza Langhans, Hatfield Public Library, MA