Maybe you’ve gone on one too many dates with Dystopian YA or just broke up with a Contemporary YA book.

Le style précis et quasi hypnotique de Laura Kaschichke emprunte tellement aux images de cette période de la vie aux Etats-Unis qu'il en devient poétique, sucré et cinématographique : la chimie des produits de beauté et du corps sous toutes ses manifestions, les couloirs du lycée et les cancans, la beauté des filles qui les rend presque interchangeables et la balourdise parfois troublante des garçons, l'immaturité et le sentiment que le monde n'a que du bon à nous offrir malgré nos actions d'écervelées. Slut shaming, virgin shaming, body shaming, girl on girl hate and a whole host of other things just made this book an uncomfortable read for me.

i often make book lists after reading my favorite bloggers, but i don't always remember who recommended which book and for whom. The twist and the ending of this book was fantastic, something I personally haven't come across before or since reading this ten years ago, and I would love to have been able to love the entirety of the story, I'm sad that I just can't. Some characters are more annoying than others, there's some slut-shaming and general teenager meanness, but somehow, that was kinda to be expected.

However, the book begins and ends in third person as the story is told around a campfire, furthering its set-up as an urban legend.which kind of goes against the point of a twist ending, but given this absolutely crazy thing happened, it seemed kind of lame to just give this reveal and be like, "okay the end. These weren’t just characters—they could have been any real girls in the world, and I think that’s what made this book so very startling for me. The scene really gets wierd when Kristy is informed of the boys' disappearance by a police officer and she, too, begins to wonder if the guys are really out there and, if so, what they want.

This is the kind of book you take out for a spin when you’re tried of all the typical books you’ve been reading and are looking for something different. It follows three teenage cheerleaders, Kristy, Kristi, and Desiree, at cheerleading camp (yes, I almost put the book down for that alone). What made this book special was Kasischke's voice and the brief chapters that weave through time; some readers will think these chapters are tangential, but they actually serve to deepen the character and her friendships. Around a campfire, sit a group of girls telling gruesome and spooky urban legends: there's the girl who, for a joke, wrote a love note to Satan, signed it in blood, and burnt it and who was found in the morning naked, hanging from a jump rope in the garage; the man who tied heavy chains around his murdered wife's body and tossed her into a lake, then came home to find her sitting in his chair smiling, soaking wet; and this - the three girls, Kristy, Desiree and Kristi, who sneaked out of cheerleading camp in their red convertible one summer afternoon and flashed a smile (and a little bit more) at two boys in a rusty pickup truck.Intending to give them the thrill of their lives, all three girls flash the guys when they pass at a steep turnaround. Laura Kasischke has a talent for descriptions and can make you feel the heat and sweat on your back, taste the food being cooked on a campfire or hear the cicadas in the forest. Plus, the the level of foreboding and dread the author manages to evoke in contrast to the books innocuous setting is pretty intense. Yes, this does sound like a cheesy teen-exploitation horror/drama; rendered in Kasischke's Joyce Carol Oates-like prose, however, the story is creepy.