This novel explores the lengths to which people would go for money or glory. Set in high school, where grad students take part in the game "Gotcha", each player is given a bead to represent their life in the game. Each student has a name of a victim whose bead and next victim they need to obtain. The last person standing wins the money. Overall, the premise of the book is simple. What I liked was how Katie's personal life was interwoven with the game and how friendships were affected by the game. Shelley Hrdlitschka did well in adding twists which weren't all that predictable while reading. This definitely helped sucking me into the plot, especially when it came to parts where I was horrified at what some students were willing to do just to win.
I did have a gripe though and that was the email exchanges between Katie and her father. She wrote to him in net lingo which I found a little annoying to read and was also extremely bratty in her replies and that didn't exactly reflect the general maturity of her character. She did lapse in that though, seeing how 17-year-olds are far from perfect, so perhaps the frustration towards her father when he left her family had to be demonstrated somehow as well.
