Cracked Up To Be Review

TITLE Cracked Up To Be
AUTHOR Courtney Summers
PUBLICATION December 23rd 2008 by St. Martin's Griffin
READ February 06, 2013
SOURCE Purchased

When "Perfect" Parker Fadley starts drinking at school and failing her classes, all of St. Peter's High goes on alert. How has the cheerleading captain, girlfriend of the most popular guy in school, consummate teacher's pet, and future valedictorian fallen so far from grace?

Parker doesn't want to talk about it. She'd just like to be left alone, to disappear, to be ignored. But her parents have placed her on suicide watch and her conselors are demanding the truth. Worse, there's a nice guy falling in love with her and he's making her feel things again when she'd really rather not be feeling anything at all.

Nobody would have guessed she'd turn out like this. But nobody knows the truth.

Something horrible has happened, and it just might be her fault.

After reading Cracked Up To Be I am ready to start a Courtney Summers fan club. Every book I have read by her is my perfect book. They are straight to the point and they feature characters who are so blunt and real that you feel like you knew them in high school. She is the only author I have come across who can write characters that are so deeply flawed and completely mean & cold but make me actually give a damn about them.

Parker used to be perfect. She was on the honor roll (with distinction) 3 years running but since her best friend Jessie went missing at a party one night she has pretty much given up. She’s having weekly meetings with the school counselor and if she comes to school drunk one more time she won’t graduate. Parker had done a complete 180, she went from being Miss. Popular to being Miss. Stay-The-Hell-Away-From-Me. She did everything she could to keep people at arm’s length and she was just in general cold. In the beginning I couldn’t believe some of the horrible things she was saying and thinking & needing to find out what made her make this drastic change got me really sucked into the story. As things unfold and we find out what prompted her to close herself off she became someone that I sympathized with. Somewhere along this road of thinking she was being a total bitch, I started to care about her and feel bad that she was forced to become the way that she was.

What really got me connecting to Parker was her rocky relationship with the new guy, Jake. You can really feel her need to distance herself from him but at the same time she is fascinated with his persistence in the face of her coldness toward him. I liked Jake, he was a bit pushy but he knew how to handle Parker and really gave her what she needed. Her ex-boyfriend, Chris, is also in the picture and they clearly still like to toy with one another. Chris was great too, I couldn’t believe how willing he was to forgive Parker and still want to help her after all that she had put him through. It was clear all along that Parker loved this little triangle that was going on. She needed to be wanted to feel like her actions were actually getting her somewhere, but that went against everything she was working so hard to achieve which is what makes you really realize how mentally ill she was becoming.

What’s feeding her decent into this scary mental territory is the mystery surrounding the disappearance of Jessie, her best friend, from a party they were all at. We don’t know what happened for most of the story and we get little glimpses back to the night of the party as Parker remembers the night. I loved how this added a bit of mystery to the story. As she glances back, I was never sure exactly what had happened surrounding Jessie’s disappearance and I think the slow burn of finding out bits and pieces of the night kept the pace moving at the perfect momentum.

Summers has once again weaved a story that is unflinchingly honest and feels incredibly real. I turned the last page feeling pretty empty and emotionally drained (which is not a bad thing for me, it’s a feeling I love.) I actually sat there and just hugged my ereader for a while and went through the book again in my head. It’s safe to say that I will read anything that Summers puts out and she can’t bang ‘em out fast enough for me!