REVIEW: Gimme a Kiss (book) by Christopher Pike

Gimme a Kiss is a YA mystery/thriller originally published in 1988. I bought my copy new.

This review includes slight spoilers. 

Review:

Jane Retton is a teenager who uses her diary to imagine a slightly better life for herself. In her diary, when Kirk, her friend Alice's ex-boyfriend, asked her out, it was super-romantic and perfect. She's in the process of writing about their perfect first time having sex (in reality, Jane has never had sex) when she's interrupted. She forgets to put her diary away, which, unfortunately, soon leads to Patty, a cheerleader who hates Jane's guts, getting hold of the most recent entry, making copies of it, and passing it around school.

Jane is deeply humiliated. It doesn't help that Kirk doesn't deny the events mentioned in the diary and adds fuel to the fire by confirming that the handwriting is Jane's. But then Jane has an idea, a way to temporarily get back at both Kirk and Patty. Except something goes horribly wrong. Now Alice, one of Jane's friends, is the only one who can say what really happened. But did she actually know everything, and is she telling the police the full truth?

Yes, it totally makes sense to deal with humiliation by faking your own death and making it look like those who humiliated you killed you. Absolutely. So yeah, the Christopher Pike banana pantsery is baked right into the premise of this one. It's still fairly mild, though, because additional revelations, while ridiculous in their own way, don't make things that much more outlandish. There are much wilder Christopher Pike books out there.

None of this gave me a sense of deja vu as I was reading, so either I never read this as a teen or it just wasn't memorable enough to stick in my brain. As a mystery/thriller, it had some nice pieces that readers could put together to figure certain things out, with zero supernatural elements to complicate things. Whether it was all believable was, uh, another thing entirely.

All in all, this was an okay read. Needed even more banana pantsery. And ugh, I hated that I could absolutely imagine the 33-year-old cop proposing to [redacted] after rescuing her in the end. They would have the world's most unhealthy and turbulent relationship, ending in either a messy divorce or murder.