Young Adult Revisited

Sasha and Cal are twins and friends with Kate, who invited Jody, our main character, on a skiing vacation. Kate couldn't go at the last minute but she pressed Jody to go without her, even though she doesn't really know anyone else. Along for the ride is the hunky Drew, his friends Billy and Chris, and Ellen who has a crush on him. This is way too many people to introduce in the first three pages of a book! Jody makes a comment about the town being smaller than she thought, which causes Chris, who turns out to be a girl, to snap at her. They finally get to the cabin, and Drew does a little flirting with her. Apparently Chris has the hots for him, and this sets her off too. I get the feeling these two won't like each other very much. After telling everyone that she planned a party, Sasha takes them all out on the slopes. She comes up with this crazy game where she leaves an orange peel in the middle of the slope. They all have to ski down and try to grab it wi...

Woo-who! I just located a box of books from my last move. Let's pretend it wasn't three years ago, shall we? While many were books already covered here on the blog, there were a few hidden gems in there like this one. Believe it or not, I have probably had this for at least four years and never got around to recapping it :) Prologue: A group of counselors are out in the woods gathering branches and down wood to make a fire. They're all laughing and having fun, even though it rained the night before. Look, I just took a trip to the Moonville Tunnel a few weeks ago (Google it if you like haunted places!), and hiking through muddy woods is anything but fun. Anywho, one of the counselors slips and falls in the mud, warned you buddy, and suddenly starts screaming. Everyone looks and sees a dead body wearing a Camp Silverlake shirt. Seven Years Later. First, we get an italicized couple of paragraphs from someone warning that he remembered what happened...

Lucy wakes up in the middle of the night hearing her neighbor Allen playing basketball in the driveway. Then she remembers that he died just a few weeks ago and feels bad about losing one of her best friends. She remembers that he fell off a cement embankment that kids climb all the time, and that his mother gave her a box of things to pass onto his friends. She goes through the box and finds a videotape that she watches. She sees a few random scenes before falling asleep and doesn’t see the person staring at her from his house. The next day at school, she passes the box along to some of his friends. His friend Brad takes his comic books and his girlfriend Suzanne acts snippy towards Lucy, saying that it’s morbid for anyone to want any of his stuff. She also gives his basketball to his friend Jon because they used to play together. She gets two calls later that night from someone who just breathes and hangs up. When the phone rings again, she goes off on the caller but it’s Jon. He ...

A fisherman stumbles on a black box stuck in the side of a cliff. A few months earlier, Abby and her sister Lindsay moved to a new house after their parents’ divorce. After moving into the creepy old house, she decides to clean out the attic. Upstairs she finds an antique porcelain doll in an old leather case. Her mom thinks the doll might be valuable, but she thinks it is pretty enough to display in her room. Her friend Erin spends the night and thinks the doll is just creepy. Abby has a dream that she’s a little girl hiding in the hallway. Then she hears a scream, wakes up and finds that Erin almost fell down the stairs. Erin swears the someone or something tripped her. Mark, the hot guy in school, asks Abby out on a date. He comes by the house and Lindsay shows him the doll. She tells Abby that the doll was sitting in the middle of the hallway. Mark thinks it’s cute that she has a doll and that while pretty, the doll is not as pretty as her. Abby has another dream. This time s...

Janna is your typical teenage girl, except that she’s working as a dancer in a touring production of Grease. Right before she left for the summer, she broke things off with her boyfriend Jimmy Dare. Jimmy thought they would go to college together, get married and live happily ever after. Now she’s just living the single life. After their latest show, she notices Ryan. He’s been with the theater group before and he’s super hot, so she starts blushing as soon as she sees him. She shares a room with three other girls: Liz, Gillian and Tori. Liz warns her about Ryan, saying that they dated last summer, he started cheating on her and then dumped her for another girl. Then he kept moving on to other girls in the group. Weird things start happening and Janna isn’t sure what to think. She gets a card of a broken and torn apart leg, with a note telling her to break a leg. Then someone starts sending her flowers and leaving notes that say they’ll meet soon. Liz points out (accurately) that ...

Jenny really belongs in a Fear Street or Sweet Valley High book, where parents don’t give a shit. Her dad is some kind of freelance business consultant, moving them across the country every year or so. They move to a new town, complete with rim rocks outside. Jenny is deathly afraid of the rocks so her dad comes up with the idea that they take a family trip to climb them. Before he can, they get a phone call that there’s a problem with the sale of their old house. Since they need someone to let the painters in at this house, they decide to leave Jenny home alone. Jenny meets Sally, a neighbor girl who invites her to a scavenger hunt to kick off the summer. She shows up and immediately sees this hot guy David. He came with Diana, a bitchy girl who treats her like shit, but works with Jenny. They venture up onto the rocks and he leaves her by himself when it starts raining. She hears a scream just before he turns up. He says she just heard the wind making weird noises, but the next day, ...