There’s Someone Inside Your House by Stephanie Perkins

Title: There's Someone Inside Your House
By: Stephanie Perkins
Published: 2017
Call #: YA Fiction Perki.S

A teen psychopath; a football-mad midwestern farm town and Halloween coming up on the calendar suggests one thing: a classic slasher novel.

Adding to the reader’s entertainment, this novel by Stephanie Perkins is that, and so much more.

Makani Young has been exiled from paradise, that is to say, Hawaii, where she was involved in a high school hazing episode in which her role was cruelly distorted by social media. Added to that is a changing home situation: her parents are getting a divorce. Preoccupied with their own life issues, Makani’s parents decide that, for the best, Makani should relocate to her Grandmother Young’s home in Osborne, Nebraska, a quiet midwestern farm town.  Osborne couldn’t be farther away from Makani’s life in Hawaii, in which she is a star diver on the swim team.  Owing to the notoriety of events in Hawaii, Makani begins her life in Nebraska with a new last name , new activities and new friends. Into this promising environment, evil intrudes. The victims are all classmates of Makani and some are her friends.

An early suspect is Ollie, a classmate whom Makani is drawn to. She hopes he will become her boyfriend.  Her new friendships are strained as her friends try to warn her against Ollie. Both Makani and Ollie feel insecure and isolated. In their excitement over discovering each other, both Makani and Ollie engage in self-serving lies and behavior. Makani’s Grandmother Young and Ollie’s cop brother, Chris, are not having any of this, and remind the two highschoolers that trust and honesty are all-important in relationships.

As the body count adds up, the chase is on to stop the murderer. The climax of the book takes place in a corn maze where Makani and Ollie confront the killer and rough justice is served.

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