Familiar Diversions
I'm a librarian who loves anime, manga, and reading a wide variety of genres.
Currently reading
Reading progress update: I've read 198 out of 198 pages.
Well, that was incredibly tragic.
I have no idea how I'm going to rate this. I'm definitely not the intended audience, and I know it - the way Emma and Abby's friends occasionally tried to handle things was frustrating from an adult perspective, but at the same time I could understand why they did what they did. And I could understand Emma's humiliation at the event that resulted in her drifting away from Abby, even as her efforts to hide her love of fantasy and sci-fi bugged me.
I liked the friendship stuff near the end, but I wasn't happy with the way Weatherly wrote about counseling. It wasn't so much Emma's reaction (utter horror and anger that her family thought worrying about Abby was crazy) as the way that reaction was never really challenged - one character mentioned that she'd been to counseling before and it wasn't what Emma thought, but in the end Emma's dad decided that it'd be best to just talk and listen more as a family. Readers never got to see that Emma's ideas about counseling were false and that it could be helpful.
Halloween Bingo squares of mine that this would work for:
Spellbound - This one is unexpected, but still works. Abby and Emma used to play a game in which they were adventurers battling against an evil witch named Esmerelda, and Emma's memories of their games turned out to be the key to the mystery of Abby's disappearance.
Baker Street Irregulars - Emma, a 13-year-old (or possibly 14), attempts to solve the mystery of what happened to her former best friend.
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