Three Quarters Dead (Richard Peck)

Three Quarters Dead
Richard Peck
Speak
Fiction, YA Horror
***+ (Okay/Good)

DESCRIPTION: High school is always tough, but sophomore Kerry feels especially invisible. Her best friend since forever left for boarding school and is drifting away, making new friends, while Kerry feels utterly unseen at Pondfield High. Then, seemingly out of the blue, senior Tanya invites her in to her exclusive little clique of herself, Natalie, and Makenzie. Tanya, the "Queen of Now", has her finger on the pulse of everything: every student, every parent, every teacher, every relationship started and ended, all the news that's fit to gossip about and the secrets too shameful to whisper. She's far too cool and powerful to want to hang out with a nobody sophomore like Kerry... but Kerry, starstruck, doesn't want to ask too many questions, not now that she finally has something like friends, now that she's finally been seen.
A car crash takes the three away in an instant, taking away everything that made high school, that made her life, worth anything. Tanya had become the center of her world, as she was the center of the Pondfield social scene. What is Kerry possibly going to do without her, or Natalie and Makenzie?
Then she gets a text, telling her to come to the city for a meeting. The text, impossibly, comes from Tanya.
Is it a hoax? Is it a cruel joke? Is Kerry delusional in her grief? Or is the Queen of Now someone, or something, too powerful for even death?

REVIEW: High school is Hell in many ways, and the social scene can eat a body alive, especially an awkward girl like Kerry. Even a chance at a friend, let alone popularity, is enough bait to tempt her into Tanya's trap, even though from the start she seems to understand that the girl isn't particularly nice, and doesn't really care about other people as anything but potential tools. If your self-image is poor enough, even being a tool is considered better than being invisible, and people like Tanya know how to use tools and keep them damaged and off-balance enough to never develop enough self worth to stand up and walk away. Kerry stands less chance than the fly in the spider's web, and even when she gets chances to break free, she just tangles herself deeper. And that's before the car crash and the text... It's hardly a spoiler that, no, the text is not a hoax. If Kerry was out of her depth with the living Tanya's clique, she's somewhere in the Mariana Trench with what she finds when she follows that text... and even more helpless, even when she sees more than ample evidence of Tanya's cruelty and lies. Indeed, Kerry's persistent inability to help herself starts to grate at some point. Yes, I get that peer pressure is a monster, that some teens are particularly susceptible, but in a character I need to see some hint of an attempt at a spine now and again. The events unfold with nightmarish lucidity, time stretching and shrinking like pulled taffy before the real agenda becomes clear, with Kerry falling deeper and deeper under Tanya's influence. The ending's decent, at least, but I could've done with more effort on Kerry's part to stand up and fight back, more reason to root for her against the monsters she tried to think of as friends.

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