Stealing Harper by Molly McAdams

Synopsis: Bad boy meets good girl and acts like a lunatic. Good girl wisely dates bad boy's best friend. DRAMA all over the place. Seriously, people die and stuff.

Sometimes you wish you had never met a book. Like unseeing something horrible that is now seared on the backs of your eyelids so that you see it even with your eyes closed. This review is helping me exorcise this book from my mind, though, and I am so done with this sadistic author. I was by turns, engrossed, repelled, aghast, infuriated, and just boggled. That's a lot to go through for a novella of around 150 pages. I didn't realize this is a companion story to Molly McAdams' previous novel, Taking Chances, which tells this story from Harper's point of view (an excerpt was included in my copy). There were allusions to people and happenings that I believe are more fleshed out in that first book and made reading Stealing Harper feel like I started watching a movie from the middle. Anyway, it's not rocket science and I caught on. Who couldn't since this is hardly Romeo and Juliet. These kids make Romeo and Juliet, amazingly stupid impulsive teenagers, look like wise, dignified Nobel Peace Prize winners. I can only pray that people this neanderthalic exist only in McAdams's imagination.