Tessa Hart suffers from agoraphobia after a traumatic experience during a summer program she was attending. She has even deferred her freshman year of college. She spends all her time in her room obsessing over pop star Eric Thorn on Twitter.  Eric Thorn is worried his fans will attack him. This fear started after another artist had been stalked and murdered by one of his fans. Eric is fed up with all the fangirls and the social media publicity and promoting he's forced to do, so he creates another account to anonymously bash himself and his fangirls. He decides to message one of his top followers, which happens to be Tessa, to tell her her life is meaningless and Eric Thorn will never like her. But what blossoms into a strong friendship may have deadly consequences.  I enjoyed this book. The ending was great! I'm a sucker for books like this - told through Twitter messages and police interrogations. I liked the suspense. It starts off with a police interrogation then we learn

Quinn Cutler is sixteen and pregnant. But she has no recollection of ever having sex. Before she can figure things out, her story becomes public. Rumours start flying, jeopardizing her reputation, her relationship with her boyfriend, and her father’s campaign for Congress. Religious fanatics begin gathering at their home, believing Quinn is pregnant with the next messiah. In Quinn's search for the truth, she uncovers strange family secrets that have her wondering if she really is a virgin. The book started off good with strong writing, the way lots of great YA books are written. But overall it was boring. Not much happens, some parts were repetitious, and I didn't care for the ending. My need to know how the mystery unravelled kept me turning the pages but ultimately left me disappointed. There were lots of things I liked about the book - the main character, her childhood, her grandmother's past, the setting, why she thinks she's a pregnant virgin but the whole thing ju

Kate Baron is a single mother to fifteen-year-old Amelia. As a litigation lawyer Kate works long hours and doesn't have as much time to spend with her daughter as she would like. When a phone call from her daughter's private school disrupts the meeting Kate is in with the news that Amelia has been caught cheating, Kate can't believe it. Amelia has been suspended and Kate has to leave work to pick her up. Her daughter is an intelligent, ambitious teenager who has never been in trouble a day in her life. But Kate will never get the chance to ask her daughter what's going on because by the time she arrives at the school Amelia is dead. The police and the school tell Kate that Amelia jumped in an act of spontaneous suicide, unable to cope with what she'd done. Kate accepts what they're telling her but doesn't truly believe that's what happened. When Kate receives an anonymous text saying that Amelia didn't jump, she is forced to sift through Amelia's

This is a short story prequel to Pretty Girls which was one of my favourite reads of 2016. Blonde Hair, Blue Eyes takes us through the day Julia Carroll went missing. She did things a typical nineteen-year-old would do - went to classes, went out that night with her roommate and best friend, Nancy. She thought about her younger sisters and how she should look out for them more and what they would do together that weekend. Although she had lots of different things going on in her life, her mind always came back to Beatrice Oliver. She went missing five weeks ago and it terrified Julia that a girl her own age could walk out the door and not return and can't be found. And really, it became repetitious for me. Same with what happened with her boyfriend that night. It became repetitious especially in a short story and it just felt bogged down. This was a disappointing read for me. It didn't have the same feel as Pretty Girls at all.

Libby Day's two older sisters, Michelle and Debby, and her mother, Patty, were murdered in their home. The murder was known as "The Satan Sacrifice" - a Satanic bloodbath with hateful words smeared on the walls. Libby was only seven-years-old when she testified that her fifteen-year-old brother Ben was the one who killed them. Twenty-five years have passed without Libby ever visiting Ben. A member of a secret society obsessed with notorious crimes contacts Libby in hopes of finding proof that will set Ben free. Libby only wants money, so she'll talk to the suspects from that night for a fee. As the truth comes out, she finds herself on the run from a killer. Again. This book was raw and gritty. The characters were well-developed. I couldn't wait to find out what happened to the Day's that night and feared that with all the build up I would be disappointed. But I wasn't! I liked looking back at that day, as told by Ben and Patty, and seeing how all these li

Clay Jensen returns home from school to find a package with his name on it, and with no return address, on his front porch. There are several cassette tapes inside recorded by Hannah Baker - his classmate and crush. Hannah committed suicide two weeks earlier. As he listens to the tapes, he learns that there are thirteen reasons why she decided to end her life. And that he is one of the reasons. This was interesting - it's told from Clay's perspective but as he listens to the tapes Hannah's story is interwoven with his thoughts, memories and what he's doing at that particular moment. I think this format made the book hard to put down. I did sympathize with Hannah. She gives us all the reasons that keep adding up, leading to her decision - things she may have been able to stop, things that other people may have been able to stop, how some teenagers can be so cruel and thoughtless.