Review by New York Times Review
FICTION has not been kind to cheerleaders. Maybe this has something to do with the fact that future writers are more likely to be found scowling on the bleachers than doing back handsprings across the gymnasium floor. But now Me-gan Abbott has put her spirit fingers to the task of writing the Great American Cheerleader Novel, and - stop scowling - it's spectacular. Addy is 16, and she and her friend Beth are the queen bees of their high school cheer squad. When a new coach is hired, feelings are hurt and friendships are tested. Sounds terrible, right? But don't let Abbott fool you. "Dare Me," her sixth novel, is subversive stuff. It's "Heathers" meets "Fight Club" good. Abbott pulls it all off with a fresh, nervy voice, and a plot brimming with the jealousy and betrayal you'd expect from a bunch of teenage girls. Cheering, for Addy, isn't about school spirit; it's about combating the mindnumbing abyss of teenage existence. "Ages 14 to 18, a girl needs something to kill all that time, that endless itchy waiting, every hour, every day for something - anything - to begin." "School skitters by" without touching her. Practice is the only thing that matters, followed by hanging out at the new coach's house. The coach is bent on whipping the squad into shape, and they push themselves to please her, living on broth and Adderall. Beth resists the new regime, but Addy thrives on the coach's attention. Soon Addy has taken to "driving by her house like a boy might do." Addy just wants something to happen - to feel something real. "I guess I'd been waiting forever, my palm raised. Waiting for someone to take my girl body and turn it out, steel me from the inside, make things matter for me, like never before." Abbott is unsentimental in her descriptions. Like most teenagers, Addy is worldweary and hard to impress. "And there's Emily," she says of a friend, "keening over the toilet bowl after practice, begging me to kick her in the gut so she can expel the rest, all that cookie dough and cool ranch, the smell making me roil. Emily, a girl made entirely of doughnut sticks, cheese powder and Haribo." Even when Addy feels something, she doesn't trust it. "This feeling, this high, it's not real. It's that Jesus-love flooding through me, by which I mean the Adderall and the pro clinical hydroxy-hot with green tea extract and the eating-nothing-buthoodia-lollipops-all-day." When something finally does happen - a violent, suspicious death - it tests Addy's disengaged mien. Abbott evokes cheerleading in all its sweaty, starving glory. "The air thick with Biofreeze and Tiger Balm and hairspray and the sugared coconut of tawny body sprays," she writes. After a game, "it takes a half-hour under the showerhead to get all the hairspray out." As Addy explains, "Our tans are armor." These girls know they are better than you. "You can feel that knowingness on us." At its core, "Dare Me" reveals something very true about the consuming, sometimes ugly, nature of female friendships. But Abbott is also on to something bigger. Addy describes a girl making out with a boy in the hall, "practicing the telling of the moment even as the moment slips from her." It is this moment of adolescence that "Dare Me" captures so beautifully, the in-betweenness, "like a thing arrested between coming and going. Like the second before a crouch becomes a bound." The story of girls old enough for sex but young enough that time still goes by at a crawl. "That was a long time ago," Addy says about an event at camp. "That was last summer." Chelsea Cain's new novel, "Kill You Twice," has just been released.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [August 5, 2012]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* The full range of human experience from joy, love, and lust to greed, betrayal, and despair can be expressed in any activity, so why not cheerleading? In this terrific novel, Abbott (an Edgar winner for Queenpin, 2007) takes a plot that seems torn from the headlines and transforms it into Shakespearean tragedy with friendship bracelets. Narrator Addy Hanlon is lieutenant to ruthless cheer-captain Beth Cassidy, and together they rule their high-school cheerleading squad until the arrival of Coach French, who coolly upends the power structure while letting the girls drink at her house. Addy's in, Beth is out, but Addy's in for more than she bargained, and Beth, an unforgettable villain, lashes back with stunning ferocity. As the cheerleaders train for the final game like Spartan warriors with eating disorders, there is a death, there is a mystery, and its unravelings seem to implicate everyone. Much of the novel's power comes from the way Abbott captures the fierce urgency of the teenagers' emotional lives. Living in an insular world where adults, boys, and other students are largely nonentities, they're glib about the abuse done to their bodies and psyches, living only for halftime. This is cheerleading as blood sport, Bring It On meets Fight Club just try putting it down.--Graff, Keir Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Edgar Award-winner Abbott dives into a gut-churning tale of revenge, power, desire, and friendship in the insular world of high school cheerleading, in her latest (after The End of Everything). Addy Hanlon, 16, has always been second lieutenant, "fidus Achates," to her best friend Beth, who's pep squad captain. But when a new coach flippantly removes Beth from power and takes Abby as her confidante, Beth turns vengeful. The new coach transforms the squad, changing it from a costumed clique to a competitive team and earning the cheerleaders' adulation, but the squad's development has a darker side: eating disorders, rivalries, cruelty, and the blurring of lines between student and adult. The coach has a darker side, too, and Abby is drawn into her secrets, including a troubled marriage. A shocking turn sends everyone spiraling wildly-and traps Abby in the middle. Abbott's writing in her sixth novel is deliciously slick and dark, matching her characters' threatening circumstances, and the plot is tight and intense, building a world in which even the perky flip of a cheerleader's skirt holds menace. "There's something dangerous about the boredom of teenage girls," one character says. Indeed. Agent: Dan Conaway, Writers House. (July) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Abbott's (The End of Everything) new novel takes readers behind the glitter and pom-poms of a varsity cheerleading squad to explore the dark undercurrents of high school girls. Captain Beth Cassidy, her first lieutenant Addy Hanlon, and the rest of the squad are upended when their school hires a new cheerleading coach. Sleek and knowing, Coach Collette French slices through their bravado and turns the girls into true athletes rather than merely "cheerlebrities." This results in an atmosphere in which some alpha girls falter, while others rise through the ranks. But the coach's relationship with the girls outside of school drags them into a very adult world of romantic entanglements, culminating in a shocking crime that threatens them all. VERDICT Abbott has a keen sense for the beauty, danger, and vulnerability of teenage girls; her spare, elegant prose cuts straight to the heart of the high school pecking order and brings the girls' world to life. Recommended for readers who enjoy dramatic stories about female relationships; it may also appeal to mature young adult readers. [See Prepub Alert, 1/21/12; seven-city tour.]-Amy Hoseth, Colorado State Univ. Lib., Fort Collins (c) Copyright 2012. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Following the direction taken by her last novel (The End of Everything, 2011, etc.), Edgar winner Abbott again delivers an unsettling look at the inner life of adolescent girls in the guise of a crime story. The setting is an unnamed, frighteningly familiar town that could be found anywhere in contemporary America. Narrator Addy has been lifelong best friend to Beth, now the powerful captain of Sutton Grove High School's cheerleading squad. The cheerleaders are popular mean girls, and Beth is the meanest and most popular. Then a new coach, young and pretty Colette French, arrives. She immediately asserts her authority, not only taking away the girls' cell phones, but also announcing there will be no squad captain. A battle of wills ensues between Coach and Beth. Skilled at manipulation, Coach has the early upper hand. The girls respond to her tight discipline as well as to her perfect hair and her invitations to hang out at her carefully decorated house, where she lives with her workaholic husband and little girl. In particular, Coach befriends Addy, whose relationship with Beth has been strained since a dark episode at cheerleading camp the summer before. Addy tries to balance her increasingly divided loyalties but is gradually pulled into Coach's orbit. Soon, Addy is spending more time at Coach's house than anyone else. When Beth and Addy catch Coach having sex in the faculty lounge with a handsome National Guard recruiting officer assigned to the high school, Addy swears Beth to silence. But Beth's simmering resentment and jealousy concerning Addy's relationship with Coach have reached a boiling point by the time the officer turns up dead in his apartment. The whodunit aspect surrounding this death pales against the dark sexual and psychological currents that ripple among the girls (and Coach); the question of who is emotional victim versus who is predator becomes murkier and more disturbing than any detective puzzle. Compelling, claustrophobic and slightly creepy in a can't-put-it-down way.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
