The Initial Insult

Like many teens, I had a Poe phase in high school and especially loved the Cask of Amontillado. This retelling mixes in more Poe stories - The Masque of the Red Death, The Fall of the House of Usher - that made it more fun to try to recall them all. This definitely ends on a cliffhanger and I'm interested to see where it goes from here.

I don't know about this one. McGinnis is really good at drawing a realistic portrait of teens in crisis, and I think this one got a little carried away with the source material and made situations too unrealistic. There were far too many bodily fluids involved for my taste. On the other hand, it was atmospheric and chilling and well written. I probably wouldn't hand this to anyone unless they asked to be disturbed.

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A modern retelling of The Cask of Amontillado (with some other Poe references thrown in there for good measure), The Initial Insult centers around former best friends Tress and Felicity. Now on opposite ends of the social circle spectrum - Tress lives with her one-eyed, alcoholic grandfather in what is known as the “White Trash Zoo”, whereas Felicity is wealthy and popular - the two find themselves at the same wild party one night. It's no coincidence, though: Felicity wants to buy drugs from Tress, and Tress has her own plans for Felicity, as Felicity was the last person to see Tress's parents before they disappeared several years ago. And if Felicity doesn't confess what she knows, Tress will slowly seal her into an old coal chute, brick by brick.

Although I love the weirdness of this book, and appreciated that the dual narrative allowed you to feel sympathy for both characters and their situations, I didn't really connect with this book the way I did with the author's other works. I thought that the third POV narrative was unnecessary, and took me out of the story every time it popped up. That being said, it was compelling enough that I breezed through it, and I will certainly be reading the next one. This will be an easy recommend for fans of YA thrillers. 3.5 bricks sealing up your former best friend in a coal chute out of 5
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Welp, that was bananas.

I went into this book wanting to like it more. The premise hooked me immediately. The short story it's inspired by was one of my favorites when it was assigned reading. Unfortunately, I feel it made some incredibly weird mistakes. These include: the "everything is a misunderstanding" trope, weird poems written by a jaguar??, and a nonlinear timeline. I was also just really annoyed by how many cliffhangers the end had. I will fully admit it was a page turner and I read it quickly but I didn't feel satisfied when I put the book down.