From School Library Journal
Grade 8 Up. With skill and suspense, Levitin unveils a family's dark secrets. After her mother's sudden death, Laura, 16, is determined to discover why the two of them were never close. Searching through her mother's personal possessions, she finds a "Friends Forever" bracelet, a photograph of two teenage girls labeled "Megan and me," and an unmailed letter, written the day before the woman died, addressed to Megan. Laura mails the letter adding an explanation and hopes for a response. She then leaves on a class trip to Washington, DC, drawing close to her mother's hometown of Birch Bend, VA. With her friend Kim in tow or covering for her absence from scheduled events, Laura makes repeated visits to the town looking for the truth. Her obsessive investigation propels her to make a secret, one-day round-trip flight to Toronto to meet Megan. Piecing together the woman's disturbing reminiscences of Laura's mother with newspaper files in the Birch Bend library, Laura makes a shocking discovery: Megan and her mother killed Megan's parents. Laura's gripping quest will captivate teen readers. Although several chance encounters and repeated violations of school-trip rules seem improbable, the two girls create believable alibis. Tension builds steadily as Megan is slowly revealed as a psychopath who will kill again to keep the past buried. The complexities of friendship, loyalty, and honesty are fully explored. Wary of adults but yearning for parental love and understanding, Laura is a daring, resourceful, and introspective heroine.?Gerry Larson, Durham Magnet Center, Durham, NC
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Gr. 7-10. Although never close to her mother, Laura is nonetheless thrown for a loop by her parent's sudden death. To ease the pain of loss, she begins going through her mother's things, but instead of giving her a better understanding of her distant, mercurial mom, her snooping opens a Pandora's box full of secrets. Even her mother's name seems to be a lie. Levitin starts out strongly here, examining Laura's confused feelings about her parents and her relationship with her friend Kim; and the Nancy Drew^-like investigations are intriguing. The author strays off course and into melodrama, however, when she suddenly enters the villain's consciousness and when she has Laura fall in love (at first sight) with the boy who turns out to be the villain's son. As is true of Levitin's recent novel
Evil Encounters (1996), there are some nice touches here, with the heroine somewhat more dimensional than is usual in this genre, but it's an uneven, not entirely satisfying read.
Stephanie Zvirin
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
