Author: Sara Farizan
Publisher: Algonquin Young Readers

Growing up, Cori, Maz and Sam were inseparable best friends, sharing their love for Halloween, arcade games and one another. Now it’s 1992, Sam has been missing for five years, and Cori and Maz aren’t speaking anymore. How could they be, when Cori is sure Sam is dead and Maz thinks he may have been kidnapped by a supernatural pinball machine?

These days, all Maz wants to do is party, buy CDs at Sam Goody and run away from his past. Meanwhile, Cori is a homecoming queen, hiding her abiding love of horror movies and her queer self under the bubble-gum veneer of a high school queen bee. But when Sam returns—still twelve years old while his best friends are now seventeen — Maz and Cori are thrown back together to solve the mystery of what really happened to Sam the night he went missing. Beneath the surface of that mystery lurk secrets the friends never told one another, then and now. And Sam’s is the darkest of all.

Award-winning author of If You Could Be Mine and Here to Stay, Sara Farizan delivers edge-of-your-seat terror as well as her trademark referential humor, witty narration and insightful characters.

I have to rate this book average. There are a few things lacking. First, the use of the first-person point of view – it works well when just one person is narrating the story, but this book has several narrator-characters in a diary-like format, and that fails to give the uniqueness of each character.

The style of storytelling means that the characters’ thoughts, expressions, sarcasms, etc., seem like they’re coming from just one person. And yet the second voice is the antagonist. Also, there is no clear intention or motivation for the bad guy, resulting in a climax that lacks thrill and excitement.

Lastly, the plot sequence is problematic. It mixes present and past, including flashbacks spread throughout the book. At first that goes smoothly, but as the story progresses, the to-and-fro causes a loss of momentum for readers, especially where things get exciting only for the plot to suddenly shift backwards. And that happens quite a lot.

However, I appreciate the creativity. The author tries to make a very strange character out of a unique setting. I also like the touch of gender neutrality and the different races and cultures highlighted in the book.

- Kevin Velayo