Gr 10 Up—Sarah Weaver, 17, of Beverly Hills, CA, is dispatched to a women's college in Massachusetts after being found by Nana, her grandmother and guardian, in flagrante delicto with a high school guy. Arriving at Wetherly College, she meets her beautiful roommate, Maddy, and Maddy's friend Agnes. Soon the three girls decide to move off campus into a spacious house Agnes has rented, a house that becomes the setting for a disintegrating friendship triangle. Maddy, a needy orphan, is certain she will die young. Agnes is protectively in love with Maddy, and Sarah has a sexual encounter with Maddy's boyfriend. Secrets and lies ensue, creating a tightening spiral of deceitful alliances and emotional instability, and Sarah, as narrator, adds to the miscommunication by believing anything she is told. College life is negligible in the novel; instead, out-of-town trips in Agnes's Mercedes and the deepening drama at the shared house dominate the narrative. In her irrational state, Maddy believes that the death of someone else will add years to her own life and enlists Sarah to help her drown Agnes in the bathtub. But it is a handgun that brings down both Agnes and Maddy in the murder-suicide that concludes this tale of feminine relationships gone horribly wrong.—Susan W. Hunter, Riverside Middle School, Springfield, VT
As a freshman at the all-women's Wetherly College, Sarah agrees to move in with beautiful, intriguing Maddy and Maddy's not-so-friendly best friend, Agnes. Sarah can't avoid getting involved in Maddy and Agnes's perverse, codependent relationship, which culminates in a fatal showdown. Though there's some gratuitousness to the titillating sex and violence, the dark novel is gripping in its psychological intensity.
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