The other characters are also conveyed as real people, but are only lightly, if illuminatingly sketched: Vera doesn’t pretend to know what any of them are thinking (apart from her father, perhaps), and so, as a result, the motives of, say, Jenny Flick, are a bit murky. I did find it rather hard to believe that she can attend high school and at the same time hold down a full-time job as a pizza delivery technician, even if she is trying to save what she can to pay for college). She has problems, but she tries to deal with them, some with more success than others. I particularly liked Vera’s voice in this: she’s a convincing teenager. The non-Vera interjections are often amusing, and I rather liked Ken Dietz’s flow-charts for living life, but they’re not all necessary to further the plot, carried through Vera’s narrative, though they do deepen it. It’s not told in chronological order, either, which prolongs the mystery of Charlie’s death and betrayal, and how Vera eventually comes to terms with her own guilt at failing to help her friend at the last. The novel is told primarily from Vera’s point of view, with wry interjections from her father, the Pagoda (a folly outside town) and even the dead Charlie.

Charlie had got involved with the ‘Detentionheads’ at school, and with Jenny Flick, in particular, who told lies about Vera so as to make Charlie break with his friend. At the beginning of the novel, Vera explains that she had been betrayed by her best friend, Charlie Kahn, who had died some months earlier.

Her mother left her daughter and husband when Vera was twelve, and as the story unfolds, the reader learns more about the family’s history and actions, which in turn explain the relationship between Vera and her father. Vera Dietz is eighteen, a high school senior living in a small town in Pennsylvania. I wouldn’t have got this book were it not for Erin’s recommendation at Aelia Reads: I pass on my own recommendation, because King’s novel is excellent.

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