In the Cards: Life (review)

Friends Anna, Eve, and Syd return here, and this time it's Syd's turn to get a reading of the Tarot cards that have proved prophetic for her best buds (see In the Cards: Love, BCCB 1/07, and In the Cards: Fame, BCCB 1/08). Since Syd's already anxious—about her moody and increasingly unreliable father, about the distance she feels separates her from Anna and Eve, and about her beloved elderly cat—she's thoroughly creeped out by a reading laden with death and doom. The girls wrestle with their belief in the cards, which have been steering Anna and Eve toward highly desirable outcomes, and things look up a little when Syd's crush on Eve's older brother looks to be going somewhere more concrete, but soon it seems that, cards or no, all three girls are hitting tough times. Fredericks adroitly ups the stakes for this presumably concluding volume by overtly addressing the fact that the cards aren't destiny and by turning her lens onto the relationship between the friends, strained here by Syd's feeling of outsiderdom and Eve's jealousy when Syd embarks on her relationship with Mark. Syd's narration is effective in conveying her biased viewpoint—she's initially determined to loyally defend her father against what she sees as her mother's judgmentality—while hinting at the realism beyond, and the exploration of her relationship with her father is much more than a problem novel about his drinking; in fact, that's what finally opens her eyes to her tendency to model herself on her father's weaknesses as well as his gifts. Though this is Syd's story, all three girls have been given enough success in their desired areas to satisfyingly wrap up the trilogy, if such is the plan; on the other hand, the cards have provided a splendid way to focus and explore classic teen anxieties, and they may have still more secrets to reveal to our intrepid friends.