A Good Idea

Gr 9 Up—When her parents split right before she started high school, Fin moved with her mom from the coastal Maine town of Williston to New York City. Now that she's graduated, she'll spend the summer, as she does every year, back in small-town Maine with her dad. This summer promises to be nothing like the others, however. Betty, Fin's best friend since childhood, disappeared the previous fall, and Betty's ex-boyfriend, Calder, confessed to drowning her but was let loose on a technicality. Soon after arriving in Maine, Fin discovers that everyone acts as if Betty never existed. Everyone, that is, except Serena, a teen who is trying to assuage her pain with pills and alcohol. With Serena, Fin finds both a sexual relationship and a partner to avenge Betty's erasure. Together with Owen, an older local guy, they try to uncover what happened—and make Calder pay for it. While Moracho's narrative offers elements of a murder mystery and a psychological thriller, it is not an edge-of-the-seat read. The novel's real strength lies less in a suspenseful plot than in its subtle look into the dark places that minds, particularly those of teenagers on the brink of adulthood, can go and the different factors that can drive them there.