Monday, April 25, 2011

The Raising by Laura Kasischke

The accident was tragic, yes. Bloody and horrific and claiming, the life of a beautiful young sorority girl. Nicole was a straight-A student from a small town. Sweet-tempered, all-American, a former Girl Scout, and a virgin. But it was an accident. And that was last year. It's fall again, a new semester, a fresh start.

Craig, who has not been charged with murder, is focusing on his classes, and also on avoiding Nicole's sorority sisters, who seem to blame him for her death even though the police did not.
Perry, Craig's roommate, is working through his own grief (he grew up with Nicole, after all, and had known her since kindergarten) by auditing Professor Mira Polson's sociology class: Death, Dying, and the Undead.

Mira has been so busy with her babies -- two of them, twins, the most perfect boys you could imagine but still a nearly impossible amount of work even with husband Clark's help -- that she can barely keep herself together to teach (Death, Dying and the Undead), let alone write the book she'll need to publish for tenure.

And Shelly, who was the first person at the scene of the accident, has given up calling the newspapers to tell them that, despite the ''lake of blood'' in which they keep reporting the victim was found in, the girl Shelly saw that night was not bloody, and not dead.

This was so super creepy. I read it in one day and it reminds me of something but I can't seem to remember what. A movie or something. Nicole, the sorority, the hazing, all of it; creepy, creepy, creepy. I could not put this book down, and yet I read the whole thing, and have no idea what the outcome was; I didn't get it. That was the only negative thing. Knowing this author wrote The Life Before Her Eyes (I saw the movie, didn't even know it was a book until I started reading this one), I knew that the ending was going to leave me confused, but I had hoped for more of a resolution than there was. A story about relationships, campus ghosts, getting into the perfect sorority, and obsession at the very heart of it, I think anyone who reads this will be up late finishing it. And if you do and understand the ending? Please let me know....

4 stars

2 comments:

Sarah said...

This sort of sounds like that made-for-tv-movie "Dying to Belong" which starred Hilary Swank and Mark Paul Gosselar. The book sounds interesting though and I am in need of a book! Thanks!

diamondgirl said...

Let me know if you understand what happened. :-)