Books I've Read: You Must Not Miss

 

This was a really odd book that was nothing like what I expected from the cover or reading the blurb.  I finished it a couple of weeks ago, but I'm still thinking about it because it was so completely fucked up.  I mean, look at that cover.  It looks pretty non-threatening, right?  Sweet even.  At first glance, anyway.

Believe me.  This book is not sweet.

The main character is Maggie (AKA Magpie).  A few months ago she caught her dad in bed with her aunt and her family imploded.  Now her mother does little but drink, her dad lives somewhere else and her sister has moved out and won't reply to Magpie's phone calls.  To make things even worse, something happened at a party and her best friend won't talk to her either.  Everyone calls her a slut in the hallways and the only place she can eat lunch is with the other misfits.

To escape the harsh reality of her real life, Magpie starts writing in a notebook about her ideal world - a town like her own, but without the people and things that make her real life miserable.  She believes so fervently in this world that she somehow manages to write it into existence, creating a portal to her fantasy in her own back yard.

Up until this point in the book I thought it was going to be some kind of gritty drama and Magpie was going to triumph over all her problems is some way.  And she does.  Kind of.  But not in the way I expected at all.

You see, the fantasy world she has created isn't quite as sweet and idyllic as it seems on the surface.  There is a dark underbelly and it might just take as much from Magpie as it gives.  Unless it is fed...

I still don't know exactly what I thought about this book.  It was oddly unsettling, especially when Magpie started using the fantasy world for getting her revenge on those she felt had wronged her.  I don't often say this, but I kind of wished it was longer so the way the two worlds interacted and affected each other could be better explored.

But overall, this was an intriguing book and one that left me thinking for days afterward.

But don't just listen to me.  Here's the blurb:

Magpie Lewis started writing in her yellow notebook the day her family self-destructed. That was the night Eryn, Magpie's sister, skipped town and left her to fend for herself. That was the night of Brandon Phipp's party.

Now, Magpie is called a slut whenever she walks down the hallways of her high school, her former best friend won't speak to her, and she spends her lunch period with a group of misfits who've all been socially exiled like she has. And so, feeling trapped and forgotten, Magpie retreats to her notebook, dreaming up a place called Near.

Near is perfect--somewhere where her father never cheated, her mother never drank, and Magpie's own life never derailed so suddenly. She imagines Near so completely, so fully, that she writes it into existence, right in her own backyard. It's a place where she can have anything she wants...even revenge.