Choker -- Elizabeth Woods
Cara Lange hasn't had a close friend since elementary school.
Actually, she hasn't had a real friend at all since moving away from her childhood best friend, Zoe.
Now, at sixteen, she still flies solo and mostly under the radar. She feels shy and awkward pretty much all of the time. And high school gets suddenly worse when the popular girls at school decide to make her life a living hell.
But, then, a seeming miracle: Her best friend Zoe re-enters her life.
I'd have liked Choker a lot more if I hadn't just read another book with an extremely similar storyline. And by extremely, I mean, like, if you wrote out outlines, they'd look almost exactly the same.
That isn't to say that Choker wasn't good: It was. It was totally competent and totally fine and totally readable and totally enjoyable and if I hadn't just read the other one, I'd probably feel MUCH happier about it.
I mean, the dialogue occasionally gets a bit stilted, there are some lines ("The words stabbed Cara like a knife") that we've all heard before, most of the secondary characters are two-dimensional and towards the end, the ultimate arc of the story gets a bit LIKE WHOA OVERBOARD, but it's a decent read.
The Cara/Zoe relationship is really excellent, and Woods creates some seriously creepy moments between the two of them; the scenes between Cara and her mother are especially good as they tiptoe around each other and much Unsaid Stuff; and it'll be a book that many readers will want to immediately start again upon finishing.
Like I said, if I'd read it in a vacuum, I'd have enjoyed Choker much more.
But I didn't read it in a vacuum.
And that's how I know that while Choker was perfectly enjoyable, Joanna Nadin's Wonderland was special.
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Book source: ILLed through my library.