Book Review: Fatality

A Fair Trade Book

Title: Fatality

Author: Caroline B. Cooney

Date: 2001

Publisher: Scholastic

ISBN: 0-439-13524-9

Length: 198 pages

Quote: “Lying on the front passenger seat, as if it didn’t matter, was Rose’s diary. It mattered.”

The year she was twelve, Rose Lymond kept a diary.

She had a crush on one of the boys who played in a band with her older brother. They are still friends.

Anjelica Lofft, not so much a mean girl as an immature rich girl, was “going through friends” by picking a schoolmate to share her expensive toys but not actually playing with or talking to each “friend.” Rose was one of the girls invited over to play with Anjelica’s toys.

Anjelica’s father was horribly arrogant and conceited.

Anjelica’s father’s co-worker, Frannie Bailey, was murdered at her home while Rose was at Anjelica’s house.

Anjelica’s father came in shaken and upset.

Rose went home and never went back.

The murder has never been solved.

Now the police think Rose’s old diary may hold a clue to the murder. Rose panics and destroys the diary. That gets her into trouble with the police. Suddenly Anjelica wants to talk to Rose again...and somebody may have tried to run over Rose while she was picking up trash with the community service gang.

What does Anjelica know? What does Rose know? Who really killed Ms. Bailey? How much danger is Rose in, and whom should she be afraid of? And what is Rose’s deep, dark secret? Is it a secret any more, anyway?

As so many times before, Cooney meets the requirements for a genre novel while delivering something more insightful. Fatality is insightful. And funny. And suspenseful. And sad. And the kind of thing that makes adults shake their heads and say, “Kids!” Like so many of Cooney’s other novels, it’s blatantly genre fiction, palpably improbable...and yet, something like it has to have happened. Details that even teenagers who self-dramatize with similar fantasies can recognize as projections of teen drama mingle with stories taken straight from the newspapers.

This is a Scholastic book. It's been reprinted for school book clubs that offer kid-sized prices on new books if enough members of a class buy a book each month. If the children in your life attend a school that participates in a Scholastic Book Club plan, you can help their classmates form the habit of buying real books by encouraging them to buy Fatality through the club rather than buying it for them from this web site. If they don't, however, you can buy it as a Fair Trade Book for $5 per book, $5 per package, $1 per online payment, as discussed in the Greeting post, and we'll send $1 to Cooney or the charity of her choice. Up to seven books of this size will fit into the package and, if you picked seven more of Cooney's popular short novels (I'd suggest The Snow, The Fog, The Fire, Both Sides of Time, Out of Time, For All Time, and Prisoner of Time, which would be two complete series) for a total of $45 or $46 online, Cooney or her charity would receive $8.