Pip’s sleuthing is both impressive and accessible.

But someone is watching, and Pip may be in more danger than she realizes. With his help, Pip digs deeper, unveiling unsavory facts about Andie and the real reason Sal’s friends couldn’t provide him with an alibi. Unable to ignore the gaps in the case, Pip sets out to prove Sal’s innocence, beginning with interviewing his younger brother, Ravi. Andie’s body was never recovered, and Sal was assumed by most to be guilty of abduction and murder. The original investigation concluded with most of the evidence pointing to Sal, who was found dead in the woods, apparently by suicide. For her senior capstone project, Pip researches the disappearance of former Fairview High student Andie, last seen on April 18, 2014, by her younger sister, Becca. Pip has known and liked Sal since childhood he’d supported her when she was being bullied in middle school.

Hard-to-read story, hard-to-stop-reading writing.Įveryone believes that Salil Singh killed his girlfriend, Andrea Bell, five years ago-except Pippa Fitz-Amobi. Connor is White, as is the majority of the cast Ario is Muslim. And secret sex and romance underscore the lack of social liberty and self-acceptance but also support the optimistic hope of freedom. Lord of the Flies–like survival skills, murder, and brutal violence (Tasers, spears, guns) fuel the story. Connor’s physical and emotional inability to fully find comfort in being gay isn’t magically erased, acknowledging the difficulty of self-acceptance in the face of disapproving homophobes. This story points fingers at despicable zealots and applauds resilient queer kids. And that’s all before the unraveling of a mystery, a murder, gunshots, physical violence, emotional abuse, heat, humidity, and hell on Earth happen in the span of a single day. His rocky relationship with his mother is disintegrating, his frustration with exuberantly out Ario grows, accusations of being the absentee father of his BFF’s baby boy haunt him, and he gets violently absconded to a Christian conversion camp in Costa Rica. At the behest of his boyfriend, Ario, Connor begrudgingly comes out, which is where the book begins. But when it comes to the rite-of-passage revelation to his single, hardcore Christian mother that he’s gay, he can’t find his words. A hardscrabble antihero’s coming out lands him in an off-the-grid conversion camp.Ĭonnor Major of Ambrose, Illinois, has quite a mouth on him.

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