Choker (Elizabeth Woods)

SUMMARY:  

Sixteen-year-old Cara Lange has been a loner ever since she moved away from her best and only friend, Zoe, years ago. She eats lunch with the other girls from the track team, but they're not really her friends. Mostly she spends her time watching Ethan Gray from a distance, wishing he would finally notice her, and avoiding the popular girls who call her "Choker" after a humiliating incident in the cafeteria. 

Then one day Cara comes home to find Zoe waiting for her. Zoe's on the run from problems at home, and Cara agrees to help her hide. With her best friend back, Cara's life changes overnight. Zoe gives her a new look and new confidence, and next thing she knows, she's getting invited to parties and flirting with Ethan. Best of all, she has her BFF there to confide in. But just as quickly as Cara's life came together, it starts to unravel. A girl goes missing in her town, and everyone is a suspect—including Ethan. Worse still, Zoe starts behaving strangely, and Cara begins to wonder what exactly her friend does all day when she's at school. You're supposed to trust your best friend no matter what, but what if she turns into a total stranger?

MY THOUGHTS:


This book was ugh. It was predictable and anti-climatic and unsuspenseful. I wanted to be creeped out and the mystery really be to a mystery but it wasn't. This book was a teen boring version of that movie with Johnny Depp, the Secret Window.

Very early on I figured out what was going on. It just seemed too predictable although the author was trying to make it a twist. At first I thought that Zoe was real but then I started thinking.

It's absolutely too much of a coincidence that crazy-Zoe just happened to show up the day that Cara is humiliated at school and gains the nickname "Choker".

Then after thinking about it I thought it was also too coincidental that Sydney dies after making fun of Cara. Of course it made sense if Zoe was really a crazed friend and everything but I started thinking it was all weird.

Then I remembered something that Cara had mentioned in the beginning about her parents hanging around everything when they first moved. Maybe she was crazy or something and her parents started hanging around more.

And it was weird that Cara kept talking to herself mentally about the murders/kidnapping and talking about Zoe. Then when she started smelling stinkiness and...by the time Ethan said that there was no one there when Zoe and Cara were fighting in the barn, I knew it.

But what the heck? What kind of cops let anyone on a crime scene anyway?

This book could've been so much more but it wasn't.