Addy Hanlon has always been Beth Cassidy’s best friend and trusted lieutenant. Beth calls the shots and Addy carries them out, a long-established order of things that has brought them to the pinnacle of their high-school careers. Now they’re seniors who rule the intensely competitive cheer squad, feared and followed by the other girls — until the young new coach arrives.
Cool and commanding, an emissary from the adult world just beyond their reach, Coach Colette French draws Addy and the other cheerleaders into her life. Only Beth, unsettled by the new regime, remains outside Coach’s golden circle, waging a subtle but vicious campaign to regain her position as “top girl” — both with the team and with Addy herself.
Then a suicide focuses a police investigation on Coach and her squad. After the first wave of shock and grief, Addy tries to uncover the truth behind the death — and learns that the boundary between loyalty and love can be dangerous terrain.
The raw passions of girlhood are brought to life in this taut, unflinching exploration of friendship, ambition, and power. Award-winning novelist Megan Abbott, writing with what Tom Perrotta has hailed as “total authority and an almost desperate intensity,” provides a harrowing glimpse into the dark heart of the all-American girl.
About Megan Abbott
Megan Abbott is the Edgar Award-winning author of five previous novels. She received her Ph.D. in literature from New York University and has taught literature, writing, and film at NYU, the New School, and SUNY-Oswego. She lives in New York City.
Dare Me: A Novel by Megan Abbott
The Daily Beast Book Review – July 23, 2012 (Excerpt)
Teenage friendship—the electric, combustible kind—is the focus of crime novelist Megan Abbott’s latest book, Dare Me, a heady tale of high-school drama with grown-up stakes. For 16-year-old Addy Hanlon, there are really only two things that matter in the world: Cheerleading and her best friend, Beth. Cheer is a sorority, an identity, a way of life, and wise-cracking, trouble-making, bad-ass cheer captain Beth is Addy’s fearless leader and partner in crime. But the arrival of a new coach for the cheer squad disrupts Addy and Beth’s insouciant reign over their peers. Young, pretty, petite, and commanding, Coach French demands toughness: bleacher runs, drills, sweat, hustle, discipline. Addy is immediately enamored of her new coach, whose drive gives Addy new strength and focus, and the moments Coach lets down her guard to share in her adult-infused brand of girlie camaraderie are intoxicating. Beth, bursting with destructive teenage schemes, won’t be displaced that easily, however. When Coach French’s relationship with Sergeant Will, a handsome military recruiter who is a fixture at the school, becomes the focus of a homicide investigation, Beth sees her chance to act. “Beth is almost always lying about something,” Addy observes, “but the lying is her way of rendering something else, something tucked away or confounded, manifest.” And so Addy wonders, at every turn: Does Beth know something she doesn’t? Abbott’s rendering of the power-plays, rites of bonding and twisted loyalties of teenage girls is pitch-perfect. As much as Dare Me is page-turning murder mystery, it is also an ode to the dark side of girlhood friendship. [Read the full article...]
Bring It On - ‘Dare Me,’ by Megan Abbott
The New York Times Book Review – August 10, 2012 (Excerpt)
Fiction has not been kind to cheerleaders. Maybe this has something to do with the fact that future writers are more likely to be found scowling on the bleachers than doing back handsprings across the gymnasium floor. But now Megan Abbott has put her spirit fingers to the task of writing the Great American Cheerleader Novel, and — stop scowling — it’s spectacular.
Addy is 16, and she and her friend Beth are the queen bees of their high school cheer squad. When a new coach is hired, feelings are hurt and friendships are tested.
Sounds terrible, right? But don’t let Abbott fool you. “Dare Me,” her sixth novel, is subversive stuff. It’s “Heathers” meets “Fight Club” good. Abbott pulls it all off with a fresh, nervy voice, and a plot brimming with the jealousy and betrayal you’d expect from a bunch of teenage girls.
Cheering, for Addy, isn’t about school spirit; it’s about combating the mind-numbing abyss of teenage existence. “Ages 14 to 18, a girl needs something to kill all that time, that endless itchy waiting, every hour, every day for something — anything — to begin.”
“School skitters by” without touching her. Practice is the only thing that matters, followed by hanging out at the new coach’s house. The coach is bent on whipping the squad into shape, and they push themselves to please her, living on broth and Adderall. Beth resists the new regime, but Addy thrives on the coach’s attention. Soon Addy has taken to “driving by her house like a boy might do.” [Read the full article...]
We are the only country that makes guns, including military-style assault weapons, available to anyone who wants to buy them. This is not freedom. It is a tyranny of death and destruction — a tyranny of which the National Rifle Association is proud. The Washington Post
