Sometimes college instructors who have a lot of papers to grade will use a method in which they find a paper that is a good representative of each letter grade and then group other papers accordingly. If I were to do that with books, this one would be a perfect three star example.
The premise of NEED is that a new social media website pops up and starts sending invitations to the students of one particular high school. If they join and invite some number of “eligible” (i.e. enrolled at that high school) friends, they can get whatever they say they need. Obviously, this has a limit: the number of enrolled students is finite, and eventually there will be no one left to invite. What then? That’s when NEED ups the ante, asking students to carry out small but probably sinister acts – deliver a package or a note, switch one pill for another, take a picture of this document or that one. It does not take a genius to intuit that this is leading up to some bad shit. Our protagonist, Kaylee, needs a kidney for her dying brother.
The good parts of this book:
- It’s a decently unique premise.
- It’s not part of a trilogy even though it technically could be and the author already wrote another trilogy. Not every YA book needs to be a trilogy. It doesn’t overstay its welcome.
- It was fairly suspenseful.
- Kaylee has legit flaws.
- There’s a romance crammed in, but it ends up going not where you think it will and I respect that.
The bad parts:
- It was really forgettable.
- The “but before I kill you, let me explain everything!” villain monologue just annoys me.
- One kid gets way too into being a bad guy, way too fast. I guess that could happen but it seemed implausible.
- I know teenagers are shallow, but the crap most of these kids are asking for exceeds even normal teenage shallowness.
- Pretty two dimensional characters. Super weak dialogue.
That about covers it.
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