My Best Friend's Exorcism by Grady Hendrix...a review

The title of this book makes it sound like a bouncy YA  with a dash of horror--maybe something along the lines of BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER. That is not this book. Instead, Grady Hendrix has whipped up a complex study of teenage friendship that' is brutally honest about class iand exceptionally sharp in dissecting the pecking order of a private high school in the deep South where the worst thing you can do to a dad is make him look like a Republican.

Abby, the book's narrator, is a kid whose life takes a downward spiral after her father, an air traffic controller, loses his job when President Reagan goes over his union for calling a strike. She's buoyed up by her freindshp with Gretchen, a rich girl who lives in the "nice" part of Charleston in a house that always smells of air conditioning and carpet shampoo. They are closer than sisters and then something terrible happens to Gretchen that changes everything.

As Gretchen goes into freefall she gives Abby plenty of reasons to simply walk away from their friendship but Abby will not do it. And because she will not, she pays a horrific price. The way Hendrix lays this out is very well thought out, and he final chapters of the story are genuinel tense, genuinely horrific, and terribly, terribly real. This is a book about love and loyalty and boundaries. And it will make you ask--how far would you go to save someone you love?