“Nobody ever wants to be inconvenienced by all the things that happen to girls.”
Ellie Frias is a teenage girl with the same basic desires as any other young girl: to be pretty, to be liked, and to have friends. Instead, she goes through middle school being bullied and ostracized, and enters high school simply wanting to disappear. When she catches the eye of a popular boy in her grade, she thinks things may finally be turning around for her – until she really does disappear, and realizes that the thing she wants more than anything is to be found.
Although this maybe isn’t specifically “horror” in genre, it definitely has elements and themes found in books that are, so I’d recommend it to fans for sure. It’s also a bit like a few other books I’ve enjoyed: The Lovely Bones, Girl Made of Stars, and What Girls Are Made Of come to mind as being similar in theme – but none of them is exactly the same at all.
The social commentary regarding how our society deals with the horrors girls and women encounter every day is a difficult subject to approach in young adult fiction, but it’s so, so important to have these kinds of stories to let girls know that they aren’t alone.
This is a rough one, I won’t pretend otherwise. I went into it without knowing anything, and that was a tough experience, so I’d recommend looking into it if you struggle with topics of sexual violence or murder. I won’t soon forget Ellie’s story, which is unfortunately only a slightly more paranormal version of so many real girl’s stories.
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