by Stefan Petrucha
ages: 12+
First sentence: “Garish.”
Review copy sent to me by Bloomsbury/Walker Books. (Yes, I am branching out and actually reviewing ARCs on my blog. They have to go somewhere…)

Caleb Dunne is a slacker. Self-proclaimed, all he aspires to do is not work very hard. He got suspended for something he didn’t do (wrong place, wrong time), and now, at the start of a new school year, he’s feeling the results of that: no one’s talking to him, except for his girlfriend Vicky. And she wants him to come to this after-school club, the Crave, and read this book The Rule of Won. The idea is that anything can happen to you or for you if you only think about it hard enough and want it bad enough.

Everything’s fine and good for a while — they do a couple of immanifests (the visualizing and chanting that gets you what you want) that work out, and Caleb is flying high. Until… well, until a teacher gets into a car accident, a close friend attempts suicide and another acquaintance is beaten up and put in the hospital. The book is less about Caleb’s self-discovery and relationships, though that’s a big part of it, and more about the dangers of group-think, and the line between “club” and “cult”. On those levels, it works quite well. Caleb is an engaging character, humourous, slightly dense, earnest, and likeable. His own relationship with the Crave is an interesting one; it starts out being just for Vicky and then morphs into something more challenging, and, eventually, more dangerous. Pertucha did a fabulous job writing group think — the chapters that are the Crave’s message board get more and more creepy as the book goes along, as the members get more and more immersed in the mob-mentality — as well as making Caleb and some of the secondary characters extremely compelling.

But, I think the book falters because there’s this element of mysticism surrounding Ethan’s (that’s the Crave leader) younger sister. Can she do magic? Or all those coincidences? Really? In the end, it’s murky. I think we’re supposed to believe, on some level that Ethan’s sister is making things happen. On the one hand, that’s really quite cool (and the way she does it is very unique). On the other hand, I think it undermines the message (if there’s even supposed to be one) that there’s a fine line between achieving things, and achieving things at all costs.

Even with that teeny bit of misdirection, the bottom line is clear: Fanaticism is a bad thing. Even if you’re fanatic about something as simple (?) as a book.