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Reviewed by:
  • Mister Death's Blue-Eyed Girls
  • Elizabeth Bush
Hahn, Mary Downing . Mister Death's Blue-Eyed Girls. Clarion, 2012. 330p. Trade ed. ISBN 978-0-547-76062-9 $16.99 E-book ed. ISBN 978-0-547-82237-2 $16.99 R Gr. 7-10.

It's 1956, junior year is just wrapping up for Nora, and a summer stretches ahead that she intends to fill with friends, movies, and dreams of a real boyfriend. Two of the girls she hangs around with goad her into attending a drunken party in the woods, where Nora witnesses Cheryl flirt with a new conquest, fend off her angry ex, Buddy, and humiliate yet another boy making advances. There's school the next day, but Cheryl and a younger pal, Bobbi Jo, never show up, and their bullet-ridden bodies are discovered on the route to the school. Buddy, who has threatened Cheryl in the past, is immediately suspected of murder, and even though the police release him for lack of evidence, his life in the small town is ruined. Nora, however, can't quite bring herself to join the crowd in condemnation of "the killer," and her growing sympathy for Buddy's plight only complicates her attempt to deal with the deaths and the knowledge that, had she and a friend not been a bit late for school that morning, they would have undoubtedly shared the victims' fate. Hahn bases her story on a homicide among her own teen acquaintances, and it's clear by the raw grief of Nora's narration (which alternates with that of Buddy and the killer) that Hahn is still exorcizing personal demons. The veracity of this tragedy raises the stakes for readers who are already fans of Hahn's supernatural fiction, and the coming-of-age component of Nora's shattered naïveté is all the more searing. In an author's note, Hahn says, "I'm not the only one who has never forgotten a single detail of that morning in the park." Readers aren't likely to forget either. [End Page 561]

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