Innocence by Jane Mendelsohn reads like a YA Rosemary's Baby with a literary twist. Becket is living with her recently widowed father and is coming to terms with going to a new school and hitting puberty. Her school, while an exclusive academy in Manhattan, has a history of suicides, especially among its female students.

Told in a stilted first person, Mendelsohn captures Becket's increasingly fragmented thoughts as she is sucked into whatever is causing the rash of suicides. When her father remarries, things get worse and she begins to suspect her step mother.

While I'm not normally a fan of punctuation free dialogue, I found it worked here. The book is almost free verse disguised as a prose. With short chapters, short sentences and little in the way of punctuation, I really felt like I was in Becket's head. ( )

promising, but ending disappoints. ( )

Adolescent angst is made much worse when dealing with vampires. In spite of the presence of vampires, this is not a horror novel. ( )

Colleen Mondor's Adult books for Teens February 2008