Story for the Week
Whodunit?!
Kids love solving mysteries, and there’s no shortage of teenage and kid crime solvers in books and on television: Nancy Drew, the Hardy Boys, the Scooby Doo gang, Harriet the Spy, Power Rangers, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, even the kids from the Riverdale series (although I would argue that they are portrayed way more like adults than teens). Maybe it’s an innate need to develop critical thinking and problem solving skills, but there’s a reason that kids still play Clue even though it’s been around since 1949.
I also think kid detectives appeal to kids and teens because they’re “just like me.” They go to school, they have homework and curfews, they go to dances, they fight with their siblings, and they hang out with their friends. They just happen to do a little crime solving on the side, usually enlisting the help of their siblings and friends—and definitely not with the help of their parents.
When I was growing up, Nancy Drew was a girl-next-door type. Polished, kind, polite, sweet, she was well-liked and just happened to be a girl detective. The same could be said of the Hardy Boys, the Boxcar Children, and the Scooby Doo gang. These characters have been around for a long time, and times have changed a lot, so the Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys of my youth would be major goody two shoes by today’s standards.
As times change, so do the characters that authors create. I recently finished a book about a girl detective who is as far from a girl-next-door as you can get. She skips school, sneaks out of the house, and intentionally puts herself into sticky situations.
Book Review
⭐⭐⭐⭐
4 Stars for You’re Next by Kylie Schachte
465 pages
Publisher: jimmy patterson
Publication Date: July 7, 2020
I received an advance copy of this title from NetGalley and jimmy patterson in exchange for an honest review.
Publisher’s Description
When a girl with a troubled history of finding dead bodies investigates the murder of her ex, she uncovers a plot to put herself—and everyone she loves—on the list of who’s next.
Flora Calhoun has a reputation for sticking her nose where it doesn’t belong. After stumbling upon a classmate’s body years ago, the trauma of that discovery and the police’s failure to find the killer has haunted her ever since. One night, she gets a midnight text from Ava McQueen, the beautiful girl who had ignited Flora’s heart last summer, then never spoke to her again.
Just in time to witness Ava’s death from a gunshot wound, Flora is set on a path of rage and vengeance for all the dead girls whose killer is never found. Her tunnel-visioned sleuthing leads to valuable clues about a shocking conspiracy involving her school and beyond, but also earns her sinister threats from the murderer. She has a choice: give up the hunt for answers, or keep digging and risk her loved ones’ lives. Either way, Flora will regret the consequences. Who’s next on the killer’s list?
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Main Characters:
- Flora – 16 years old, lives with her grandfather, found the body of a classmate a couple of years before this story, considers herself a teen detective but this makes her an outcast at school
- Olive – Flora’s 13-year-old sister, resents Flora because their mother left them with their grandfather
- William – Flora and Olive’s grandfather, retired CIA
- Cass – Flora’s best friend
- VT – starts as a stranger to Flora but becomes her partner in solving the crime in this book
For an adult reader, it might be difficult to suspend disbelief on Kylie Schachte’s debut novel You’re Next, but as a former fan of all things Nancy Drew, I think this works well as a teen/young adult thriller. If you consider the popularity of CW’s Riverdale, where high school students play at law enforcement, owning businesses, signing contracts, running bars, Flora Calhoun’s teen detective role isn’t much of a stretch.
Would this story be believable in real life? Heck no, but I do think it would appeal to my teenage daughter and her friends who aren’t drawn into adult thrillers yet. There’s a reason this is in the genre it’s in. This is where the love of thrillers begins.
Flora is a self-aware teenager, but she’s not very likeable as a protagonist. She disobeys her grandfather (who is way too lenient), she disregards the feelings of her one and only friend, she is completely insensitive to her younger sister who really just misses her mom. But I think that’s a lot of what makes this story work. Flora is determined to get to the bottom of her “cases” no matter what anyone thinks of her, and her friend and family still love her and stand behind her.
I got the impression that this is the start of a series, and I think Flora would make a good lead if she could rein herself in. The author would have to make her way more likeable so that readers will root for her.
What knocks this down to 4 stars for me is the lack of development in Flora’s backstory. We know that she found a classmate dead a couple years before, but we don’t really get a lot of detail about that case or Flora’s role in messing up the investigation. We get very limited information, so it feels like you’re missing something. A number of other reviewers mentioned thinking that this was a sequel, and it does feel that way.
This is a pretty long novel to start with, so I suspect that some of the backstory was trimmed in editing, but the book is less effective without that detail. We also don’t get a lot of information about why Flora and Olive’s mother left, so she could have just been left out of the book completely.
All in all, I think this will appeal to its target audience. I look forward to reading this author again.
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