PERFECT LIES

Fia’s freed her sister, Annie, from the sinister Keane organization but at a high price: severing contact between them to maintain the fiction that Annie’s dead (Mind Games, 2013).

Competing demands and desires further rend Fia’s tattered psyche: recruiting girls with paranormal abilities to be shaped by the Keane School while plotting its destruction and protecting the vulnerable—especially Annie, who’s blind. Without her sister to rely on, Fia grows increasingly dependent on James, who’s got issues of his own. Meanwhile, Annie can’t enjoy the freedom for which her sister sacrificed herself, not when her own visions point to a calamitous future. Always the more stable of the sisters, Annie’s equally determined to protect the vulnerable, including Fia, a task complicated by romantic entanglements and the choices they entail. The sisters’ alternating narration helps to modulate the tension, balancing Fia’s jittery, violent persona with Annie’s focused, levelheaded one. Fia’s emotional extremes verge on tiresome without quite crossing the line. White avoids sequel padding, keeping her tale lean and streamlined, and again makes skillful use of temporal shifts (readers are wise to keep track of dates and times) in constructing her suspenseful plot.

If the narrative (it’s less a sequel than Mind Games’ second half) doesn’t explore new territory, there’s plenty in its template to hold readers fast.