Book Log: Bliss
Oct. 12th, 2008 10:01 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
penmage
Bliss by Lauren Myracle
Bliss is excited to start Crestview Academy. Fresh off the commune, dumped on her grandmother's doorstep by her parents who are off to Canada to avoid Nixon's war, she is eager to make friends and experience real life, like she sees on the Andy Griffith show.
Crestview may be bright and beautiful and ivy-covered, but it's full of secrets, too. There is a voice that only Bliss can hear--a voice that whispers of blood and bones and tombs. Bliss figures she'll be okay as long as she stays away. But there are secrets among the students, too, hiding in the most unexpected of place. Dangerous secrets that will enmesh sensitive, kind Bliss in their web, and destroy anything--and anyone--in their path.
I am haunted by this book. Literally. I fell asleep while reading yesterday (a commentary on my state of mind, not the book) and dreamed over and over again about it. And last night, even as I struggled to stay up and finish it, when I fell asleep, I dreamed about it again. And now that I've finished it, I can't stop thinking about it.
I am awed and impressed by what Myracle has done here. This is a genuine, actually scary ghost story for teens. (And let me say, this is one creepy package that absolutely does justice to the inside. Gorgeous!) She doesn't pull any punches. She never holds back. This story is really freaking creepy. There were times, reading last night alone in my living room, that I had to close the book, because I had the creeps.
She's not gory. Never gory. But Myracle packs this novel full of atmosphere and voice, and she builds the suspense and the creepy so very well that as it rises to a close, you feel it gripping you in the throat.
I was impressed that she went to the places she went. At the beginning, I could have sworn I knew where this story was going. The interspersed diary pages, belong to one SLL, is clearly leading the reader to the red herring of Sarah Lynn Lawrence, and I genuinely, actually believed that SLL was Sarah Lynn. The "clues" are all in place--and wouldn't it fit? Wouldn't it feel right if the pretty girl was also the crazy, evil girl? All of our literary perceptions and experience tells us that the fat, misunderstood girl always has a heart of gold, it's just up to the kindhearted protagonist to see her for what she really is.
And that's brilliant as well. When Bliss's "average" friends--the ones who care about boys and popularity and school dances, all the things that Bliss has never cared about before--tell her that Sandy is different and strange, and that she should stay away, she--and we--are sure as sure that it's because Sandy is fat and unattractive and has BO. That they are shallow-minded and can't see past the exterior to the interior.
But they're right. They're right because, as Bliss--and we--learn, terrifyingly, later, Sandy is wrong on the inside, too, and has been for a long, long time. That final moment, when Bliss struggles to remember why she befriended Sandy in the first place--and when she discovers for herself the truth behind that perceived moment just tops out the horror.
This is a scary book, because it's a ghost story, but much more terrifying that Liliana's evil presence is the evil lurking underneath Sandy's deceptive exterior.
The interweaving of the plot with quotes from TV, ads, and most importantly the Manson Family trials is also a nice touch, weaving in the truly terrifying with the terrifyingly true--and not letting us forget, even for a second, that while ghosts may be fiction, human evil is fact.
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Date: 2008-10-18 05:45 pm (UTC)-Em
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