Rosebush
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
After a hit-and-run, a young girl struggles to uncover the truth of that fateful night in this addictive thriller.
“Beautiful, sly, and brilliant. I stayed up until 5 A.M. trying to figure out the secret. It was a shocker!”—Nancy Holder, New York Times bestselling author of Possessions and the Wicked series
“My heart was pounding . . . when it wasn’t breaking. Rosebush is as intense as it is poignant.”—Meg Cabot, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Princess Diaries series
The truth is like a rose: beautiful, but watch out for the thorns.
Jane Freeman opens her eyes on the morning after Jocelyn Gunter’s epic Memorial Day party and finds herself tangled in a rosebush, pierced by hundreds of tiny thorns, paralyzed, and unable to remember a single detail from the night before.
Her mother and the doctors say the hit and run was an accident, but Jane knows the truth. Someone tried to kill her. Someone from the party. The clues add up—the drink, the slammed door, the kiss, the car, the ring—but with no memory, it’s impossible for Jane to tell the difference between what really happened and what everyone wants her to believe.
Unable to leave the hospital until she’s fully recovered, Jane lets long-buried memories begin to resurface, making her question everything she thought she knew about love, friendship, and loyalty. Her friends come and go, each with a different version of what happened that night. And Jane has to figure out who’s really on her side—before the killer strikes again.
Whose memory can she trust, when she can’t even trust her own?
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Jaffe (Bad Kitty) has honed her craft with several adult thrillers, and that's a big benefit for a story that is superficially identical to a slew of recent YA novels featuring innocent heroines sucked into the popularity trap by rich girls with evil hearts. Jaffe, too, presents the de rigueur litany of designer names and cliquey cruelties, and there's no surprise when the villain is unveiled. Where this story distinguishes itself is in character development. Jane Freeman is a believable adolescent, trivial and thoughtless most of the time, but capable of insight and empathy when she stops to think. And trapped in an ICU bed after a near-fatal hit and run, Jane has a lot of time to do just that. She also seems to have company, as eerie threats from a "secret admirer" appear in her hospital room. Jaffe fully develops the evolution of Jane's situation and the piecemeal return of her memories after her trauma-induced amnesia fades. Even when adults around Jane question her sanity, readers will continue to trust this character who has been so thoroughly and sympathetically unfolded. Ages 12 up.
