Looks can be quite deceiving, so I hope they change the cover of this book upon publication. The dark folds, the zipper, the hint of a kid whose eyes we can’t see, it’s great marketing to try to appeal to those readers who are hung up on the vampire craze right now, but those are mostly female and they will be sorely disappointed in this book. And unfortunately, the male readers that the author probably wants to appeal to don’t even read much at that age, which is why I’m shocked they are even bothering with a hardcover edition which will be too pricey.
The book has a great premise but falls short across the board. The main characters are a group of male friends in high school…Micheal (yes, it’s spelled wrong…probably so you don’t think it’s the author writing about himself), Tommy, Mixer, and Bones. The book opens with Tommy disappearing after he gets sent to the principal’s office. After he’s gone a few days and his mom starts to worry, the other three friends start to wonder what happened. These guys are the kinds of kids we all knew at some point in our life…they were losers who always wore black, skipped school or fell asleep in class, got bad grades, and smoked cigarettes. The characters in this book are no different.
Unfortunately, Mixer and Bones are very flat characters because the entire book is told from Micheal’s point of view, which gets very redundant after a while. The entire book is him talking and he goes on a rant about obsessing over getting an email reply from a girl he met last summer, catching Bones and a girl having sex in an abandoned house, and watching CSI shows at home while eating pizza with his mother. Northrop definitely captures Micheal in his words and makes him believable. His language is very true outside of way too many contractions like shouldn’t've, wouldn’t've and Bones’d.
A big part of the book is the three friends starting to suspect their English teacher, Mr. Haberman, of killing Tommy. Haberman is teaching the class the book, Crime and Punishment, which begins to sound like a metaphor for the murder of Tommy. Northrop has good intentions and his use of the literary classic sounds very promising, but it too falls short of its purpose because the loser characters don’t even read much of the book.
Instead, the reader is led through “a week in the life of” some loser teenage friends going to school and acting tough, smoking cigarettes, having sex, and checking their MySpace profile for friend requests. I kept saying to myself, “Hello! One of your friends has gone missing! Did you forget about him??” Besides going to Haberman’s class a few times and the guys trying to read too much into his lecture on the book, Northrop doesn’t take the story in a climatic direction until chapter 18 (there are only 25 chapters in the book) which ends up being some over-the-top brutality which would have worked better had it only happened earlier or if the first 17 chapters leading up to it were a bit more dark and interesting.
Tommy’s storyline gets all wrapped up in the end with a nice little bow (quite stereotypically), but I won’t spoil it for you here. If you get bored with this book, just skip to the last 8 chapters (55 pages). But I will say this book is just an updated recycled version of Killing Mr. Griffin, but not nearly as good. Northrop’s characters are predictable and all the same. They lack appeal and interest for readers these days and are almost insulting. Outside of the teacher, the mom, and the cops, we don’t really get a sense of any other characters in the book. They are only mentioned in passing. Even Natalie, the girl who has sex with Bones in the old house, is doped up like a Zombie.
I can’t believe Scholastic would even put their name on this book. If the rock band tee shirt wearing punk kids actually want to read this book, they will steal it. I generously give it 3 stars only because the concept is there, it’s just not executed. And Micheal, the lead, is a great character and Northrop has done an okay job with him. But one character is not enough to carry this story out.
