“If you think I’m going to apologize for being drugged and raped, you have another thing coming.”

This book was incredible. It was well-written, with an incredibly compelling story and characters that I felt I could reach out and touch. I devoured it, and it’s stuck with me for the last few days and probably will for years to come.

“There’s a moment when I know that I should scream. But screaming would be hard. And blackness would be easy. Black picks me.”

Hermione Winters is captain of her cheerleading team in a small town where cheerleading means more than the actual sports cheered for. A couple weeks before school starts, she and her team (including her boyfriend Leo) attend cheerleading camp. At camp, Hermione drinks spiked punch, blacks out, and wakes up in the hospital. Her best friend Polly (one of the best fictional characters I’ve ever read) breaks it to her — Hermione was sexually assaulted, and left in the lake.

Hermione spends the rest of the novel dealing with the fall out — the potential for pregnancy, the whispers in a small town, her very freaked-out parents, and her own emotions about an event that she can’t remember, but can’t deny.

It’s such a powerful book — not only the content, but the characters themselves. It’s hard to believe that it’s only 250 pages long, as the characters are so incredibly well-developed. The female friendships, in particular, leap from the page. Go read this one!