Dear Cassie

by Lisa Burstein

Overview

What if the last place you should fall in love is the first place that you do?You'd think getting sent to Turning Pines Wilderness Camp for a month-long rehabilitation "retreat" and being forced to re-live it in this journal would be the worst thing that's ever happened to me.You'd be wrong.There's the reason I was sent to Turning Pines in the first place: I got arrested. On prom night. With my two best friends, who I haven't talked to since and probably never will again. And then there's the real reason I was sent here. The thing I can't talk about with the guy I can't even think about.What if the moment you've closed yourself off is the moment you start to break open?But there's this guy here. Ben. And the more I swear he won't—he can't—the deeper under my skin he's getting. After the thing that happened, I promised I'd never fall for another boy's lies.And yet I can't help but wonder…what if?

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781620612552
Publisher:	Entangled Publishing, LLC
Publication date:	03/05/2013
Sold by:	Macmillan
Format:	eBook
Pages:	352
File size:	849 KB
Age Range:	12 - 18 Years

About the Author

Lisa Burstein received her MFA in Fiction from the Inland Northwest Center for Writers at Eastern Washington University. She lives in Portland, OR, with her very patient husband, a neurotic dog and two cats. Dear Cassie is her second novel.

Editorial Reviews

Gr 10 Up—Predictable, implausible, and deeply unpleasant are the terms that best describe this book. Cassie is a foul-mouthed, cigarette-craving, recent high-school graduate who, along with her two best friends, stole drugs from the boys who stood them up on Prom Night. She writes in diary form from a "sleep-away camp for criminals," the consequence of her criminal behavior. She is joined by two other girls (not her friends) and four boys, one of whom, predictably, becomes her love interest. Cassie's fellow campers are both stock characters and unlikely ones. The other two girls have not apparently been convicted of any crime-one is a mute, compulsive thief; the other a compulsive liar. One annoying boy constantly peppers his fellow campers with factoids about the wilderness. Ben, the love interest, is, of course, a good boy taking the blame for his beloved older brother. One can understand Cassie's use of the "f" word as a form of emotional armor (for an abortion, readers learn late in the book) but scatological references are so much a part of this novel that the "f" word is in the chapter headings. Despite the foul language, the novel has an antiabortion, antisex subtext that makes one wonder if it were intended to serve a hidden agenda.—Nina Sachs, Walker Memorial Library, Westbrook, ME

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