The Deal: Angie caught her boyfriend and her best friend Lizzie in bed together on prom night, and in the aftermath Lizzie was branded a slut and harassed until she took her own life. It should be the end of the story, but graffiti keeps showing up on Lizzie's locker, and someone is copying Lizzie's diary and pasting it around school.Angie feels guilty over what happened to Lizzie and she's determined to find out what's really going on at school, what really happened that night between her boyfriend and Lizzie, and she will not rest until she has some answers.
My Thoughts: I don't want to go into details with the plot because it works as kind of a mystery and even if I didn't particularly like this mystery I don't think it would be fair to ruin it for other people.
The S-word takes a look at how quickly a reputation is lost and blames are assigned and how harsh it is for the person who is deemed guilty. In this case that person was Lizzie, but whatever happened didn't leave Angie untouched, she's obsessed with Lizzie and her death and her own role in it - Angie never stepped up to protect Lizzie, never even asked her side of the story - and now she want answers and she's willing to go pretty far to get them.
For me that was the problem I have with the book, Angie was a bit over the top when it came to what she did and how she did it, she was a little all over the place and I found it hard to sympathise or empathise with her, and a lot of it had to do with the way the story was written, which felt jerky and halting at times and others just went on and on about the same thing.
The rest, as I said, plays out mostly as a mystery, not a particularly hard to figure out mystery but still.
In any case, it wasn't a winner for me. It's not horrible or anything but as far as 'issue books' go, this wasn't the most compelling, sometimes it came off as preachy and I didn't really like the narrator.
The S-Word comes out May 7th, 2013.
