Gr 9 Up–In a Boston suburb, high school senior and wrestling star Tarkin Shaw has used sexploitation and revenge porn to control a slew of girls for years. McLaughlin employs a variety of perspectives to tell the story. There’s the “bitch queens,” a group of white girls who distance themselves from the toxicity of high school, and a best-friend duo of juniors: Marcus, a white aspiring journalist and DeShawn, a Black robotics genius. Shaw targets Suze, the intriguing new girl, as his next victim of sexual predation by drugging her, taking nude pictures, and threatening to post them online unless she agrees to be his girlfriend. Suze convinces Marcus and DeShawn to help her escape Shaw’s clutches and their simple plan results in murder. The suspense keeps pages turning while also tackling some serious topics, including sexual assault, privacy, hacking, systemic racism in the police force and in school, and the broken criminal justice system.
VERDICT A complex and intriguing title to add to the YA canon, written in a vivid style that has the veracity of contemporary teen talk.
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