Hate List: A Novel~ Jennifer Brown Review

Enjoyment: ★★★★

Plot: ★★★★

Characters: ★★★★

Flow: ★★★★☆

Overall: ★★★★

What if you wished

someone would die

and then it happened?

What if the killer was

someone you loved?

Five months ago, Valerie Leftman's boyfriend, Nick, opened fire on their school cafeteria. Shot trying to stop him, Valerie inadvertently saved the life of a classmate, but was implicated in the shootings because of the list she helped create. A list of people and things she and Nick hated. The list he used to pick his targets.

Now, after a summer of seclusion, Val is forced to confront her guilt as she returns to school to complete her senior year. Haunted by the memory of the boyfriend she still loves and navigating rocky relationships with her family, former friends and the girl whose life she saved, Val must come to grips with the tragedy that took place and her role in it, in order to make amends and move on with her life.

I thought that this book was riveting. I could barely put in down. Despite the depressing content I thought that this was a really good book. However because of the depressing content I decided to space the reading out in two days. Now that I am done I almost wish that I had read in it one day.

The plot was easy to follow as long as you read the page that told you the date on it. If you skip that you may or may not get slightly lost because in the beginning the book goes back and forth between the present and the past. Also there are a lot of flash backs through out the book.

Near the end of the middle of the book it tries to redeem some characters that I just could not stand because of how they acted in the beginning and I found myself unable to care about their problems because they were just horrible to Valerie. However the characters that I end up disliking throughout the course of the book and continue to dislike even now were very surprizing to me.