Complicit by Stephanie Kuehn
✩Starred Reviews – Publishers Weekly, School Library Journal & Booklist
From the very first page of Complicit (St. Martin’s Griffin, 2014, $19.99, Ages, 14 and up), author Stephanie Kuehn keeps readers off-balance, trying to figure out what’s true and what’s right. The YA psychological thriller opens at 3:29 a.m. with the narrator’s phone ringing. “I like to be prepared,” Jamie says, “so I sleep with my phone beneath my pillow just in case someone calls. No one ever does of course.” But the phone is ringing, and already something doesn’t add up.
At breakfast, Jamie figures out the call was probably from his sister Cate, who has just been released from prison, much to the family’s dismay. Another problem for the reader: how could a teen do something so awful that even her parents and brother completely give up on her? On hearing that Cate is free, Jamie’s hands go numb, which is inconvenient because he has all sorts of routine high school activities planned for the day, including playing piano in the school jazz band. There’s nothing routine about the condition that occasionally makes his hands limp and useless, though: “even the big-shot doctors down at Stanford can’t figure [it] out”.
In other words, before the first chapter is over, it’s easy to like Jamie and empathize with him, but there are also already lots of questions about the past he shares with his troubled sister. It’s the beginning of a wild ride that forces the reader to consider the repercussions of shielding people from painful truths. Also, does hiding someone else’s bad behavior make you complicit in the crime?
I recommend this book to all teens and adults who like a thriller and can handle Hitchcockian violence — there are some horrors to imagine in Complicit, but the violence occurs off-stage. This is author Kuehn’s second novel. Her first, Charm & Strange, won the 2014 William C. Morris Award for outstanding YA debut.
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– Reviewed by Mary Malhotra