Alyson Noël. Saving Zoë
St. Martin’s Griffin  $10.95  ISBN 978-0-312-35510-4  240 pg.
Reviewed by Ceilidh, Age 15

I turn the page but that’s it. And every one that follows is as blank as the one before it, nothing but blue lines on white background, Zoë’s loopy handwriting coming to its final rest.

I close my eyes and lean back against the cushions, tears pouring down my cheek, thinking how strange it is that her diary ended on “Yes!” When her life probably ended on “No!”

I sit there, holding her book in my lap, unwilling to look at it, unable to let go.

Getting through high school, as a fifteen-year-old is hard. But it gets even harder when your older sister is murdered. Sadly, that is the position that Echo is in. With boys in and out of her life, new and old friends treating her completely different, Echo must learn to cope, and move through the stages of death, while embarking upon her Grade 10 year. She thought she knew her sister, but when Marc, Zoë’s old boyfriend, gives Echo Zoë’s diary, Echo realizes that she did not know her sister as well as she thought. She already knew about the drugs, the drinking, and the parties…but there are a lot of other things that Echo would never have expected.

This novel involves things that most people prefer to think of as non-existent; things that they think if they ignore they will go away. But those problems don’t just go away! They get bigger and bigger until the point, where in this book, it takes someone’s death to make a change. Internet predators can be anyone, and this book illustrates that perfectly. It was a very emotional book for me to read; it will make you laugh; and it will make you cry. It can make you angry and confused as well. It keeps you in constant wonderment as to what actually happened to Zoë, and what is actually going on with Marc. At first, I’ll be honest, I did not want to read this book, but after the first few pages, I was completely taken in, and I was unable to put it down. I read it on the bus, at sleepovers. I couldn’t bear to put it down unless I had to.

I recommend this book for ages 13 and up, though I think the topic of Internet predators should be a topic discussed at all ages. I give this book five revealing stars, because I really, really enjoyed it, and even though it got fairly controversial, it is a topic that needs to be talked about.