Publisher: Delacorte Books for Young Readers
Source: eARC from Netgalley
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A girl who can see the past tries to save the future in this compelling tween mystery.
A girl is missing. Three girls are lying. One girl can get to the truth.
Emily Huvar vanished without a trace. And the clues are right beneath Raine’s fingertips. Literally. Raine isn’t like other eighth graders. One touch of a glittering sparkle that only Raine can see, and she’s swept into a memory from the past. If she touches enough sparkles, she can piece together what happened to Emily.
When Raine realizes that the cliquey group of girls making her life miserable know more than they’re letting on about Emily’s disappearance, she has to do something. She’ll use her supernatural gift for good . . . to fight evil.
But is it too late to save Emily?
What makes this book so tricky is my grown up mind (at least in comparison to the intended audience). It’s absolutely adorable but I also felt like it was trying to be more
mature than it was because it was dealing with so many important issues. There
were some pretty intense plot twists but I found myself giggling instead of
being shocked because the book is too cute for me to gasp at yet if I were
younger, I would definitely be gasping and thinking about how frickin awesome
the book was.
There are a lot of stereotypical aspects to this book. We
have terms like “the mean girl”, and “the mean girl’s accessories” being used,
we have a main character who is introduced to us as the stereotypical
“beautiful but doesn’t know it” and that worried me. I was worried that this book
would turn out to be one big cliché but after these initial cliché-like
introductions, the characters were fleshed out (including one of the mean girls to a
certain degree).
Raine is an interesting main character, she has the ability to
extract memories from sparkles. Before you laugh, sparkles are just the things
that appear on certain objects that only Raine can see and thus only Raine (and
her grandmother could) can read. I
thought this was an interesting paranormal addition to the story although it
made me wonder about the sparkles. Why sparkles? Why not just plain ole
touching of objects?
Raine also happens to be surprisingly mature. There are
things she has gone through that make her more mature than her peers but at the
same time, she also acts her age, she will throw a fit and she will say
something stupid or do something stupid. What I also liked about her that even
though she started making new friends right away, she never forgot about
Shirlee, who wasn’t as cool or popular.
This book deals with bullying and that worried me too! I was
scared that maybe the book wouldn’t manage to pull it off or would portray it
in some offensive way or even go down the lane of some really cruel revenge.
Bullying is such a touchy topic in general but also specifically for me and
while I won’t give the book an A+ with the way it dealt with it, I will say
that it does manage to tackle bullying in a very healthy and not
uncomfortable way.
There is also a slight romance in the book which I thought
was absolutely adorable. I wish I could quote my favorite line (in terms of the romance) but alas it
would kind of be a spoiler. You should know though that the romance isn't about falling in love but about having a crush!
I loved the plot in this book. This may be a book for kids
but I become just as invested. None of the twists caught me off guard but I
know, I KNOW that kid me would have adored this book and would have
genuinely been taken in by those twists. The problem is that the predictability made it harder for me to take what was happening as seriously as I should have been taking it.
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