Choker

by Elizabeth Woods

[Joni Reads]

I first became aware of this book when I ran across it on a blog and it sounded amazing. Basically, Cara moved away from her best friend Zoe in the fifth grade and she is bullied constantly at her new school. Then Zoe shows up at her house unexpectedly one night and suddenly everything changes. Cara starts getting invited to parties and she starts getting attention from Ethan, the boy she has been crushing on for years. But girls from school start dying and Zoe starts acting odd. Cara starts to wonder why her best friend ran away from home and what she does all day while Cara is in school. She wants to trust her best friend but soon she comes to fear her instead.
Sounds great right? I thought so too. Then I opened the book and I figured out the entire story line and mystery before the prologue was even finished. This book was like knowing there was no wizard before you even started following the yellow brick road. The story line is brilliant but it is written so that the “mystery” is so obvious that I found myself getting bored and I finally skipped to the end just so I could read what would have been a climax of the book had I not known the secret already. Maybe it’s because I watch Criminal Minds too much though. For those of you out there who are interested in a mysterious read, go ahead and try this. But if you watch a lot of CSI type shows I bet you figure out the secret as fast as I did. This was a letdown. I thought it would be a great book and it truly isn’t bad. I feel the type of disappointment with this book as I did when people started telling me all the secrets to the last Harry Potter movie. I still saw the movie but there were no surprises anymore. Regardless, the story stuck with me and my mind has been drifting back to it every so often. Not a terrible book, but I don’t think it qualifies as a mystery either.

My Grade: C