I think my least favorite character actually ended up being Karen, because for someone who professed to love her daughter as much as she did, she didn't seem to give a damn about her wellbeing at all. It would be interesting if her mother was at least extremely manipulative, and more unique than just saying that her father's a complete dick. Quinn is even said to have gotten all her negative qualities from her father, I suppose because it's easier to say that than to let her mother's character be slandered in any way. Even when the father has a good excuse, like Emma's father- of course he's not around much, he's a goddamn pilot. Cliched family backgrounds all around, in which the mothers are glorified, who needs fathers. Yeah, so for the first 200 pages, this was going the way of most really bad YA contemporaries. It seemed like she wasn't smart because in YA literature, the only smart people allowed are the likeable ones, you know, so they can take down the bullies with some witty quips.

Hell, she wasn't even a convincing sociopath- sociopaths are typically geniuses, with cool calculating minds. The stepsister is a beautiful blonde idiot, a venomous cheerleader. Instead, we got an amazing nerd girl and a sociopath for the first 200 pages (aka, most of the book). I hoped this book was about a girl who dismissed her stepsister as being shallow and mean, but after her untimely death she finds herself searching for her stepsister's killer and discovers all kinds of things about the girl she had thought she knew but never really had known. I was searching so hard for the message this book promised, the one that says not all jocks and cheerleaders are bullying morons, not all nerds are wonderful people, and didn't get that at all. In fact, for most of the book, I couldn't help but think it truly must be a parody of Heathers or Mean Girls.

I say all this because I thought this book was a mystery with a lot of contemporary elements (it's always mysteries.) and it ended up just being a straight-up contemporary. Occasionally, I'll end up enjoying it regardless- I thought Everything I Never Told You was a mystery, for instance, and it not being one didn't impact my rating at all- and sometimes (most times) I'll hate it- like All the Rage, another contemporary I thought was a mystery. Quite a few times, I've gone into books expecting one thing and having the actual outcome be completely different.

The awesome by eva darrows