By Sarah Darer Littman
Fifteen-year-old Lara attempts suicide after the boy she fell for online turns on her in front of the whole school, and the rest of the book is about who built him.
Lara Kelley is fifteen and, for once, feeling okay about herself when a boy named Christian starts messaging her. He's kind, he's interested, and for a few weeks he's the best part of her days. Then he turns on her. He posts that the world would be better off without her, out in the open where the whole school can read it, and everyone piles on. Lara attempts suicide. Her younger sister, Sydney, is the one who finds her. She survives, and the book opens right there before winding back two months to lay out, step by step, how it happened. Four people narrate it: Lara, Sydney, and the two next door, Bree and Liam. Bree was once Lara's closest friend. And Christian, it turns out, was never a real boy at all. Someone made him, and once the police start asking who, the town goes after that family with the same hunger it had for going after Lara.
The four narrators are why the book works. You're inside Bree's head while she does it, and inside her mother's reasons, and what's awful is how sensible it all sounds from in there. Nobody in this book believes they're the villain. That's Littman's whole argument, and she makes it without a single lecture. The writing is plain and it moves fast, so a strong reader of twelve or thirteen will get through it quickly, and the back half is the part most books leave out: what the whole thing costs afterward, for everyone, the people who did it included. For an older reader who's watched a group chat pile onto someone and figured it was no big deal, this is the book that pushes back.