Another random book I picked up for a couple of dollars at the Riccarton Scorpios clearance.

It felt like there was a really good book in here somewhere struggling to get out, but it never quite made it. For one thing, the plot doesn't really get going until the final quarter of the book - everything before then seems like elaborate scene-setting (except that the scene it is setting is one so familiar from a million other books set in high schools that it really didn't need three quarters of the book to set it up - and somehow the most important bit of scene-setting, establishing the motivations of the main characters, is pretty ineffective and doesn't really happen until late in the book). And there are way too many characters (I get the feeling the author kept thinking of interesting new ones and just kept throwing them in long after she had more than enough), to the point where even the author gets them mixed at times, so that lines of dialogue seem to be coming from the wrong person (either that, or the author is really bad at following the conventions of punctuating dialogue), and characteristics of one character suddenly transfer themselves to some totally different character. And the ending is weirdly rushed (and doesn't quite fit the tone of the rest of the book), like the author suddenly realised how much time she'd spent scene-setting, and had to cram the rest of the plot into a few pages to keep within the word limit.

So yeah, a lot of problems. But despite all that, there is something appealing about the story - it just isn't given the chance to live up to its potential. But I've definitely read worse :-)

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I am fairly sure that I picked this book up at a meet up sometime last year.