A complex and gripping, if flawed, unraveling of the secrets and lies of teenage girls.
A teenager at a boarding school grapples with social hierarchies, bullying, and murder.
It’s Sarah Taylor’s first day at the St. Ambrose School for Girls, and she’s hoping for a fresh start. She’d like to ditch her mother's nickname for her, Sally, and reintroduce herself as Bo. But her dreams of a new beginning are dashed when her social-climbing mother, Tera, introduces herself to a family dropping off daughter Greta Stanhope. Tera declares that Greta and Sarah will become the best of friends. Sarah immediately knows the truth: “My mother is wrong. Greta and I will never be friends.” And she knows something else, too: “And one of us is going to be dead by the end of the semester.” Sarah is not wealthy like her new classmates, dresses only in black, and has bipolar disorder: a trifecta of differences that will immediately cast her to the bottom of the social ladder. But instead of simply being ignored, Sarah becomes Greta’s object of social torture. Sarah has no friends, and while she would love to be friends with her roommate, Ellen Strotsberry, Strots offers strong loyalty but little companionship. As Sarah begins to uncover the secrets filling her dorm, her drama with Greta reaches a fever pitch, and so too do the intense hallucinations brought on by her bipolar disorder. Sarah is an unreliable narrator, and the reader will be deeply swept up in the task of figuring out what, and whom, to trust. While it is evident that Ward has attempted to treat her protagonist’s bipolar disorder with sensitivity, thoughtfulness, and at times a poignant humor, her portrayal of Sarah does dip dangerously into the stereotype that people with mental illnesses are inherently violent.
A complex and gripping, if flawed, unraveling of the secrets and lies of teenage girls.Pub Date: July 11, 2023
ISBN: 9781982194864
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 24, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2023
Soapy, suspenseful fun.
A remembered horror plunges a pregnant woman into a waking nightmare.
Tegan Werner, 23, barely recalls her one-night stand with married real estate developer Simon Lamar; she only learns Simon’s name after seeing him on the local news five months later. Simon wants nothing to do with the resulting child Tegan now carries and tells his lawyer to negotiate a nondisclosure agreement. A destitute Tegan is all too happy to trade her silence for cash—until a whiff of Simon’s cologne triggers a memory of him drugging and raping her. Distraught and eight months pregnant, Tegan flees her Lewiston, Maine, apartment and drives north in a blizzard, intending to seek comfort and counsel from her older brother, Dennis; instead, she gets lost and crashes, badly injuring her ankle. Tegan is terrified when hulking stranger Hank Thompson stops and extricates her from the wreck, and becomes even more so when he takes her to his cabin rather than the hospital, citing hazardous road conditions. Her anxiety eases somewhat upon meeting Hank’s wife, Polly—a former nurse who settles Tegan in a basement hospital room originally built for Polly’s now-deceased mother. Polly vows to call 911 as soon as the phones and power return, but when that doesn’t happen, Tegan becomes convinced that Hank is forcing Polly to hold her prisoner. Tegan doesn’t know the half of it. McFadden unspools her twisty tale via a first-person-present narration that alternates between Tegan and Polly, grounding character while elevating tension. Coincidence and frustratingly foolish assumptions fuel the plot, but readers able to suspend disbelief are in for a wild ride. A purposefully ambiguous, forward-flashing prologue hints at future homicide, establishing stakes from the jump.
Soapy, suspenseful fun.Pub Date: Jan. 28, 2025
ISBN: 9781464227325
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
A superior entry in the night-on-the-nightmare-ward genre.
A medical student is assigned an overnight shift to observe a Long Island hospital’s psychiatric ward and help with emergencies. You’d never guess what happens next.
Amy Brenner isn’t even interested in psychiatry, the one medical specialty she’s never considered for her own career. Nor is she interested any more in Cameron Berger, the classmate who ended their relationship so that he could spend more time studying, and she’s not pleased to learn that he’s switched his rotation with another student so he can spend some of the next 13 hours persuading Amy to rekindle their romance. Predictably, Cam will be the least of Amy’s troubles. Apart from Dr. Richard Beck and nurse Ramona Dutton, everyone else on Ward D is much more dangerous, from elderly Mary Cummings, whose knitting needles aren’t plastic but sharpened steel, to William Schoenfeld, who’s stopped taking the medications that were supposed to silence the voices telling him to kill people, to Damon Sawyer, who’s confined in Seclusion One and can’t possibly escape, unless a power outage neutralizes the locks. Most threatening of all is Jade Carpenter, whose close friendship with Amy ended eight years ago when Amy turned her in for what ended up being only one of a whole series of thrill crimes. McFadden measures out the complications, revelations, and betrayals with such an expert hand that readers anxiously trying to figure out whom Amy can trust as her goal shifts from ticking off a toilsome requirement to surviving the night may well end up wondering whom they can trust themselves. And isn’t provoking that kind of paranoia what medical thrillers are all about?
A superior entry in the night-on-the-nightmare-ward genre.Pub Date: March 4, 2025
ISBN: 9781464227271
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Review Posted Online: Dec. 13, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
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