Wednesday, May 11, 2016

With Malice by Eileen Cook

What if, when you woke up in a hospital with injuries, you find you can't remember what happened?  You can't remember the last six weeks of your life.  How worried would that make you?  It would be one of my greatest nightmares...

HMH Books for Young Readers and Net Galley allowed me to read this book for review (thank you).  It will be published June 7th.

No one will share anything about the accident, they won't let her have a phone, she has no TV and she doesn't remember a thing.  She's having trouble associating words.  They're there but she can't access them.  

When she does find out what happened, it's devastating.  She was in Italy on a tour with her best girlfriend.  It seems she was in a car and drove directly into a wall hurting herself badly and killing her best friend.  She has no memory of it, doesn't think she did it but knows she must have, and not knowing what happened is awful.

Her friends take sides, some people support her and others don't, and she doesn't know what to think.  She can't imagine killing her friend.  But was her friend really her friend?  People have lots of layers and you only see what they show you.

She spends the whole story trying to get her memory back but she's not sure what's really there or what she thinks she remembers because it's been suggested.  Her father is manipulating the media.  He was the one that brought her home from Italy so she could recover in the states.  He thinks she's guilty.

This a complex look at a high school rivalry disguised as friendship.  The girls are young and don't understand their feelings.  Love and hate are close together.

When the story is over, you'll be wondering what she really remembered and whether it was murder or not...

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