This is a moving and well-written exploration of friendship and loss. The touch of noir adds just enough grit and heat to the narrative, conveying Jude’s emotional and physical environment effectively. Jude, the first-person narrator, is blunt and abrasive, but it’s clear she has other ghosts haunting her. The climax, where Jude discovers the truth, slightly strains credulity, but Smith has built up Maggie’s personality in a way that supports it.
The more she finds out about Maggie, the less she thinks she really knew about her friend. She talks to Maggie’s other friends and learns that Maggie kept secrets for more than Jude alone. When Judes best friend is found dead in a California swimming pool, her family calls it an accident, her friends call it suicide, but Jude calls it murder, and the suspects are family and friends. She’s convinced that Maggie was murdered and sets out to gather the evidence. The cause of death is allegedly suicide, since her stomach was full of drugs before she drowned in her pool, but Jude isn’t buying it. Ages 14 up.Jude’s visit to her aunt’s home in New Jersey is cut short by a phone call that sends her flying back to California-Maggie Kim, her best friend, is dead. The answers Jude seeks matter far less than the painful journey of a tough character who comes to terms with something deeper than grief. Turns out, Maggie played that role for several people, yet no one truly knew her, an often heartbreaking paradox of teenage friendship that Smith (Orleans) explores deftly. Positive that her friend wouldn't commit suicide, Jude who, through Smith's keen narrative voice, is a sharp and often biting observer of human nature tries to reconstruct Maggie's final days, pulling from her own memories of a friend who knew her like no one else. When she arrives back in Pasadena, Jude is enveloped in the cloud of loss that hangs over Maggie's friends, who scrabble to claim a spot as number one mourner. Jude isn't even in California when she learns that Maggie Kim is dead, found floating in the family pool, full of pills.
With her best friend dead in an apparent suicide, a 17-year-old girl with demons of her own sets out to uncover what really happened in Smith's deeply tragic and darkly humorous tale.
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