DANGEROUS GIRLS
It's Spring Break of senior year. Anna, her boyfriend Tate, her best friend Elise, and a few other close friends are off on a debaucherous trip to Aruba that promises to be the time of their lives. But when Elise is found brutally murdered, Anna finds herself trapped in a country not her own, fighting against vile and contemptuous accusations.
As Anna sets out to find her friend's killer, she discovers hard truths about her friendships, the slippery nature of truth, and the ache of young love.
As she awaits the judge's decree, it becomes clear that everyone around her thinks she is not just guilty, but dangerous. When the truth comes out, it is more shocking than one could ever imagine...
Theatrics within a legal system
★★★★✩
A group
of Boston teenagers travel to the island of Aruba for their senior year
Spring Break. Included in this group are best friends Anna and Elise.
When Elise's body is found murdered in her hotel room, stabbed a
gruesome thirteen times, Anna quickly becomes the #1 suspect in the
investigation. But Anna vehemently pleads innocence, and the story
becomes her fight to regain her good name and freedom as she sits in an
Aruban correctional facility, awaiting the murder trial.
While
it is not revealed or directly referenced anywhere within the novel
itself or Haas' author afterword, a reader can't help but feel that this
story had to be at least a little bit inspired by the true crime
Natalee Holloway case. There are just too many similarities.
* Young teens on Spring Break choose Aruba as their destination
*
Victim Elise, first night on the island, begins flirting with young
20something hot guy in a club whose overall look, it's pointed out, just
screams money. But her friends warn her that they get a bad vibe off
him, not to go off alone with him.
That's
just early on in the book. Then there's the media spin illustrated in
the story. One brief moment of Anna's boyfriend saying something
lighthearted to her to distract her from her emotional pain even for a
second, and her momentary smile is snapped by a paparrazzi photographer
and splashed across all sorts of media sources with the angle that Anna
appears disturbing heartless, considering the circumstances --
"unconcerned, unfeeling", "sickening lack of empathy", "sociopathic",
etc. One by one, as the story picks up more and more media coverage,
Anna's friends begin to turn on her in the interest of fame.
Now,
while this particular element is original to Haas' imagination, she
does write in the character of Clara Rose, a court case analyst with a
tv news show recognizably similar in style to Nancy Grace. Clara Rose is
even described as having a blonde bobbed hairstyle and a southern
accent, y'all.
The show cuts to commercial again. This time, every woman in the room is staring at me.I try to remind myself how to breathe.I knew it was bad out there. Even locked up, I've seen glimpses of newspapers and TV news. It wasn't as if I thought everyone would be lined up, protesting my innocence, but still, Clara's show takes my breath away. I thought it would be more...balanced. Isn't that what the news is supposed to do? Present both sides of the story, fairly, not jump to conclusions based on leaked information and biased statements? We're still months away from the trial; even Ellingham swore they didn't have enough evidence to convict, so where's the support? Some kind of outcry about my arrest? Instead, they showed nothing on my side -- no mention of Juan, or Tate's lies and cheating, the balcony issue, or all the problems with the crime scene -- nothing, not one hint that I might be innocent in all this. They assume I'm guilty and they can't wait to see me burn."Killer."
But
as I said, even with the similarities, there are aspects of this story
that are uniquely Haas' creation, particularly when it comes to the
ending of this novel. While I wasn't always glued to the page, Haas
successfully keeps the suspense going enough that I was most definitely
invested in seeing how things turned out. She incorporates an
interesting cast of shady characters and casts enough doubt on everyone
that you just have to see where all the twistedness concludes!
Looking back now, I see how naive we all were. I stepped into that courtroom believing I'd have a fair shot -- a chance to state my case and be heard, the way you're supposed to. But the real truth is, it's all a performance. The trial is no different from the Clara Rose Show, in its way, only instead of a film studio with lights and cameras, we have the courtroom as our stage. The lawyers and witnesses are all actors; the judge is our audience, and whoever can sell their version of the script -- make you believe it, whether it's fact or fiction -- they're the one who wins. It's that simple. Evidence is just a prop; you can ignore it and look the other way, and even the script doesn't matter when some supporting actor can improvise their scenes and steal the whole show.
Anna's
story also brings up a good point: that if enough digging were done in
virtually anyone's life, we could ALL be made to look guilty of
something if enough spin were put on it. For example, one of the points
the prosecution team brings out is Anna having lyrics from a Florence
& The Machine song scrawled on a school binder, lyrics that they
claim clearly illustrate her mental instability.
Those are somebody else's words that I scrawled on my notebook during a boring class, and now he's holding them up as some kind of proof of my "violent urges". Why doesn't he go further, and pull up my DVR records and all the horror movies I used to watch, curled tightly against Tate on the living room couch? Why not go through my bookcase for every crime novel he can find?Wouldn't we all look guilty, if someone searched hard enough?
*****************
THOUGHTS --- TBD
STAY TUNED!!
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