What a brilliant book Dare Me is.
It tells the story of a cheerleading team that are taken
over by a new coach who wants to do things a little differently to her
predecessor. Among the first things Coach French does is to remove the role of
captain from the all-powerful Beth. In doing so, she sets in motion a complex
chain of events that will see the cheerleaders’ pyramid tumble like a house of
cards in the wind.
Beth’s a dangerous young lady. She has the ability to find
out anything she wants about anyone in her town and has the malice to use the
information she’s gathered for her own ends. (“Beth with her clenched jaw,
about to unsnap. It reminds me of something I learned once in biology: a
crocodile’s teeth are constantly replaced. Their whole life, they never stop
growing new teeth”).
It doesn’t take long for Beth to uncover something on Coach,
her latest enemy. Coach is having an affair with a young recruiting soldier.
Beth sets out to use her knowledge of the affair in a way that generals ply
their cunning and tactical awareness on the battlefield.
Caught in between the sparring of Beth and Coach is the narrator,
Addy. Addy hears things from both sides and it really messes with her head. This
confusion is amplified hugely when Addy becomes trapped in the middle of a murder
investigation where the two queens on the block play her like a pawn in a game
of chess.
Addy’s a brilliant narrator. She articulates the deepest of
her feelings with wonderful frankness. Her voice is almost poetic, being full
of rhythms that serve to perfectly create and then echo the mood of a moment.
The sentences have a wonderful quality to them. They seem fragile and delicate
and reflect something of the way in which Addy perceives herself. It’s a wonder
that from these building blocks, Megan Abbott has created a work that is full
to the brim with menace and that such sentences have been placed together in
such a way that the story is always riveting.
This novel works on so many levels. It delves into the lives
of a cheerleading team and explores some of the dynamics, drive and
relationships within the group in a fascinating way. If offers a window into a
world of texting and social networking that plays on some of the worst fears I
hold for my children. It peels off layers of teenage life to expose the
translucent hopes and anxieties of the young. It’s a brilliant example of successful
plotting and narration.
My only query about anything in the book, and it’s a tiny thing,
is the use of a prologue. It’s a scene taken from the middle of the book and it
does firmly establish the story’s compass as pointing towards the dark and
sinister. To my mind, this wasn’t necessary as the power of the actual opening
would have done the job perfectly for me.
Dare Me is written
with such a strong narration, the present tense of which adds to the sense of
rawness and sense of being exposed, that I fear the author must have needed a
spell of therapy afterwards to recover from the trauma of the experience.
I’ll loop back to the beginning. Dare Me is a brilliant book that I
believe with enrich any reader’s collection. Not to be missed.
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