This review was originally written and posted in December 2014.

This book starts out with a forward from the titular Mara Dyer explaining to us that she’s using a pen name.  She claims that a lawyer made her pick one, and that she has to speak up because there’s some seemingly normal teenager who is a killer.

And it’s important that you know, so you’re not next.

Is anyone else getting flashbacks to Animorphs here?

And much like in Animorphs, I have to wonder what the point is.  She knows the identity of a killer, but instead of going to the police or saying “so and so is a killer!!! Here’s my proof” she’s going to start her story at a birthday party?

This makes sense as a memoir or as a story framing device (a la Titanic, where there’s the sense she’s remembering this all while/and recounting it to someone else), but once you throw in “we’re doing this for your own protection and edification,” everything that doesn’t actually serve that goal becomes suspect.

(God, every time this comes up, I still want to see the Animorphs books reimagined as a series of anonymous blog posts, War of the Worlds style with facebook instead of radio.)

Well, maybe not-Mara will give us a good reason for why she published her “warning” as a fiction book, which typically takes the better part of a year to get into print, instead of as non-fiction and with authority.  Let’s read on and find out.

The story proper opens with Mara, Rachel, and Claire playing with a Ouija board.  We find out pretty fast that there is tension between Claire and Mara, and most of it is centered on Rachel, since they are each friends with her but not with each other.  Right from the start, I rather like the writing, which is smooth and does a good job getting across the characters and emotional tone without being too wordy about it.

Claire suggests that Rachel ask how she’s going to die.  Rachel gets giddy in the way only a teenager can over the prospect, and they set down to start spelling stuff.  But the board spells out Mara’s name.

Rachel insists this means “it” wants Mara to play, but Mara is still resistant for unknown reasons.  Instead, she blames Claire for moving the pointer and trying to mess with her head, forcing Rachel to act like a peacekeeper between them, and that…apparently, is the end of that incident.

Six months later, they were both dead.

Ooooo, ominous!

So…some amount of time later (six months?), Mara wakes up in a hospital.  She’s disoriented and confused and starts freaking out by all the tubes and stuff stuck in her, so she tries to tear them out in a panic, forcing the staff to sedate her.

I tried to move my hands to pull it away but when I looked at them, there were other tubes. Attached to needles. […]  I could see where the sharp steel entered my veins.

I have never in all my life seen an IV tube that was attached to a needle, or in fact anything made of steel.  They take the needle out after it’s done its job of stabbing a hole in you and leave behind a (somewhat) flexible plastic tube, because leaving sharp objects in a person is generally considered a bad idea.

I like the depiction of her confusion and panic in general, and certainly waking up to anything sticking in your hands is a bad idea, but since the needles thing got repeated twice I’m disinclined to attribute it to mental flailing.

Mara wakes up a second time, this time much calmer.  Partly because she’s drugged to the gills, partly because someone took all the tubes out of her.  Her mother and father are there, and they explain to her that she was in an accident and ask how much she remembers.

She doesn’t remember much, but they keep pressing on her to tell what she does remember.  All she can come up with is some normal after-school-routine stuff she did four days prior.  I’m not sure why her parents are so pushy about getting her memories on it, since they tell her what happened soon enough after that.  Is this how you’re supposed to act to someone disoriented and on sedatives?  Granted, I’ve never been in that situation, but it seems needlessly stressful.

She was in some place called “The Tamerlane” when the building collapsed on her.  She was trapped in an air pocket in the basement and rescue workers couldn’t dig her out until the next morning, at which point she’d passed out.  However, doctors think she’ll be fine.

Um…unless Mara can’t remember Thursday through Sunday because she was just repeating the ‘panic, drugs, sleep, panic’ cycle, that seems highly suspect.  Being in a coma for four days should come with a side effect of “the doctors want to keep a really close eye on your for a while” because anything that mucks with your brain that much is no joke.

I am really sick of seeing head injuries as just a way to pass time and up drama.  Would anything really change if this was happening just late Thursday night?  Or even Friday morning?  That’s a reasonable amount of time for her to sleep just out of pure ordeal/exhaustion, but four days is a coma and not to be taken lightly.

Mara looks in a mirror to describe herself to us.

Ah, there’s the trope-y goodness I’ve come to expect from books you guys recommend to me.  Although, it’s a pretty mild example and overall the writing in this is enjoyable.

There are two nurses standing around in the room with them.

“They’ve been taking care of you since Wednesday,”

Except you just said she didn’t get dug out until Thursday…

I have no idea why the nurses were there, since they leave right after being introduced.  (Come on, nurses are very busy and chronically understaffed, why were there two of them just standing around waiting to see if she’d panic again?  Seems like a job an orderly could have done.)

I was glad they were gone. And then I realized that my reaction to them was probably not normal.

You…didn’t have a reaction to them.  At all.  You said hi, they said some things, they left.  Forget not having a normal reaction, you didn’t have any reaction.

Mara notices some flowers in the room that are Rachel’s favorite kind, and she asks if Rachel brought them.  Her mother has to break the news that Rachel, Claire, and Jude (Claire’s brother and Mara’s crush) were all in the building with her.  No one else survived.

We still don’t know what this stupid building was, other than old, and possibly that it already collapsed once before?  The scene is very emotional and doesn’t have a lot of room for exposition without bogging down the drama, but a little bit more context would be nice.  Mostly because the only bit we do get, that someone else had been “trapped” in there before and died, is terribly unclear.  Getting a small nugget of information is fine, but it needs to be something readily understandable to the audience, otherwise I’m still distracted from all of Mara’s angst, but this time because I’m busy trying to figure out what’s going on.

Mara gets understandably upset and demands to know what exactly happened, but her mother can’t tell her because she wasn’t there.

My mother looked at me with glassy eyes and a heart-broken face. “I would if I could, Mara. But you’re the only one who knows.”

Eh, I don’t like this as much as our last dramatic line.  It’s delivered like this big, ominous thing, but shouldn’t it be just common sense that someone not even at the building wouldn’t know why it collapsed?