Michael Hornburg

Reading this book was like stepping back in time ten years, back to the culture and issues and feelings that I had ten years ago. The narrator, Chrissie, is a senior in high school and back in 1999 so was I. Her familiar objects were my familiar objects – MTV, beepers, boy-crazy friends, emotional parents. From the moment I cracked the cover and read the first chapter, I knew that this novel would contain little bits of my own history.

The story takes place over a few weeks time at most. Chrissie is about to graduate, but a gloomy senior curse hangs over her. Every year before graduation day, one member of the senior class dies. This all seems morbid but relatively abstract to her until an incident involving a car chase and a hurtling car battery have her worried that she may become the dead senior, murdered in retribution.

There is also her love interest, Bobby, her mechanic. He is older and is as unstable as a see-saw. He and the thoughts of being killed eat away at her, only to be interrupted now and then by thoughts of her runaway father, yearning mother, and drug-addled brother. She is the consummate Bildungsroman protagonist, hoping everyone will figure themselves out so that she can focus on figuring herself out. The story was refreshingly sparse and the writing was soothingly rich. I truly appreciated Hornburg’s approach to characters and his ability to infuse emotion into setting.… (mehr)