Undone -- Brooke Taylor

Perhaps (okay, now that I've actually read it I know now) Totally and completely unfairly, I judged this book by its cover art and the fact that the back copy contained the phrase "dark angel" and assumed that it would be about A Goth Girl Who Is Wicked Messed Up And Crazy And Destructive And Yet Completely Attractive To The Main Character Who Is Either Devastated When Something Bad Happens Or Realizes That She Just Needs To Walk Away From The Situation. Like I said, totally unfair. Proof?  Here:

"Over my dead body," she called.

"Stop it with the morbid death and dying stuff, okay? Leave it to the goth kids; they're more convincing anyway."

"I know you don't mean that! I'm just as depressing as they are," she called after me, but I was already rounding the corner making my escape.

I will admit it: I was wrong. I was pleasantly surprised by Undone. I LIKE KORI KITZLER, EVEN IF SHE IS A 'DARK ANGEL'.

Serena Moore was just your average eighth grade girl until, one fateful day, she and Kori Kitzler, the subject of almost every rumor at school, became friends.  After that, they were inseparable.

Fast-forward to tenth grade. Kori is still the outgoing wild child and Serena is still shyer and more subdued. They are as close as ever, fiercely protective of each other, and now that Serena has dyed her hair, they even look alike except for Serena's blue eyes. That doesn't mean that things are perfect, of course: Serena still daydreams about finding her father and she still worries quite a lot about Kori's drug use.

There's more to the story than that, of course, but I feel like it's all very spoiler-y, and I'm going to avoid talking about it—I felt that the description on the back of my review copy gave too much away. I just checked the description at Amazon, and I think it does, too.

So. While I felt that it got very soap operatic by the end (and that the Big Reveal, the reason for the soap opera-i-ness was obvious to me from the beginning) and I had difficulty believing in these characters as high school sophomores, those problems didn't bother me all that much. Because I cared about the characters*, and I cared about the outcome. It's a good one about creating family, about courage, grief, and friendship.

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*Including the secondary characters, actually—if Brooke Taylor writes a book about another one of the characters, I'll be way into reading it.