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Mood: Sleepy ]
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Currently: Eating Breakfast ]
I stumbled across this book at my local library. You see in addition to using things like Goodreads, CBC Radio and people like Rick Klaw to find my next read, I also like to troll the stacks. Trolling the stacks is the old fashion way to find your next read. You pull books off the shelf, you flip through their pages, you read the dustcover. It was on a recent such trip that I found The Murder of Bindy Mackenzie.
Bindy Mackenzie is a good student. In fact she thinks she is probably the best student at Ashbury High in Sydney, Australia. She also thinks she is the nicest. Again, this would be disputed by her peers, so Bindy documents her life meticulously. Especially her FAD group.
The school board has created a new course called Friendship and Development (FAD) where Bindy has been grouped with others in her Grade 11 year to do character development and the like. The problem is that Bindy does not like many of the other people in FAD. She considers them poisonous, and a name game exercise where people write down what they really think of her only confirms that.
But things begin to go south for Bindy when she becomes more than obsessed with her FAD group, and her life begins to unravel around her. Can Bindy figure out what is going on before its too late?
Author Moriarty constructs a story about a young woman who is not who she thinks she is. Somehow Moriarty makes us care about a young woman who is self-righteous, a little stuck up and very insecure. Maybe it is her choice to tell the story through diaries, memos, transcripts and emails. What ever it does, it works. You end up caring for Bindy a great deal, especially after you read her FAD assignment "The Life of Bindy Mackenzie".