One of Us Is Lying

Imagine if the board game CLUE, and the movie The Breakfast Club made a baby. It would be this book. Five students receive detention after school. There is a jock, an outcast, a brain, a beauty, and a criminal. Each student is in detention for the same crime, but they all swear they are innocent. In class, they are required to give up their cell phones, but each were caught with a phone in their bag. These phones did not belong to the occupants, thus making this look like a set-up. During detention a strange fender bender happens in the parking lot, which draws attention away from the room. While the teacher is out, Simon, the outcast grabs a drink of water. A few minutes roll by, and Simon finds himself having an allergic reaction, which he later dies from. Simon was just drinking water, but the cup he was drinking from had tested positive for high levels of peanut oil, which just so happens to be what Simon is allergic to. This quickly turns the novel from a stereotypical high school drama, to a thriller where you do not know what is going to happen next, and I am only fifty something pages in.
This is one of those "whodunit" kind of reads, and it provides readers with many opportunities to infer on what may happen next. In the game CLUE you are making your way around the game trying to figure out who, with what, and where. This novel provides readers with the same kind of opportunities. While I have been reading I am now catching myself saying "Oh, maybe Bronwyn, the brain, poisoned him because he saw something he should not have.
One thing about Simon's character is he provides the school with their weekly updates of gossip. He is a current Dan Humphrey from the books Gossip Girl. He created an app that he uses to basically post the schools juicy drama. This makes him a vulnerable character in the sense that some people may want to see him go. Analyzing this further made me think of being an educator in the future. While elementary students may not have as juicy drama as seventeen year olds, they still find things to gossip about. These things can hurt their peers feelings. How do we protect our students from these hurts in a social media frenzied culture? These are questions I wish I had the answers to, but I just don't. We may be able to control it within our classroom community, but the moment those students leave our reaches we cannot control what they are saying and doing. We can teach kindness and hope that it sticks.
One character I find particularly interesting is Bronwyn. She is labeled as the brain. During each chapter you get different perspectives of each character. Thus far Bronwyn has had the most excerpts. She has this good student vibe, and she seems to keep her nose clean. At one point though she starts talking about how she was struggling with chemistry last year, and the guidance counselor commends her on how she brought her grade up. He asks her to tutor others, and share how she did it. She politely declines saying she does not have time, but she subconsciously says they would not want her teaching how she really did it. That is all we got, but it gave me enough to want to know more. I am looking forward to getting more into this great read and finding out who killed Simon, and what they are trying to cover up.