This review includes mild spoilers.
Review:
Jenny's parents are adventurous and enjoy living lives that involve moving from one place to the next in a relatively short amount of time. Jenny, on the other hand, would like it if they just stayed put for a while. She'd really like a chance to get to know people, make friends, and put down roots.
Jenny's not really sure that the latest town they've moved to will be a good fit for her - the rimrocks near their new home make her a little anxious, and it seems like everyone at her new school has known each other their whole lives. Still, she does her best to settle in, and it's not long before Sally, a teen who's both an extrovert and a chatterbox, is introducing her to everyone. Jenny instantly finds herself a little drawn to David, the guy she's teamed up with during a scavenger hunt. She's also intrigued by a secret admirer she seems to have acquired, a guy who confesses his feelings for her via a message on her answering machine but who isn't quite brave enough to talk to her in person.
Everyone and everything around Jenny starts to take on a more sinister feeling when Diana, the school's queen bee, is injured in an apparent accident at the cliffs. She doesn't actually know any of these people, their relationships with each other, or what they're really like. Can she really trust her new friends?
As an anxious worrier and overthinker myself, I found Jenny to be a very relatable character. Initially, she wasn't sure whether she was just working herself into a panic over nothing, simply because she was home alone in a new house while her parents were dealing with things back at their previous place, or whether there was actually something to be worried about.
I was, however, a little annoyed that this wasn't as focused on the "creepy secret admirer" aspect as I thought it would be. Jenny's fears were pretty all over the place for a while - her new home was fairly isolated, the perfect place for someone to sneak around at night and watch her (if I remember right, her parents hadn't even had time to get blinds up in most of the windows), and then there was Diana's scarily angry ex-boyfriend, as well as some moments with David and Sally that threw her off.
The motives of the person behind everything weren't well thought out, and it would have made more sense if their aim with Jenny had been to kill her rather than just terrorize her. Now, if Jenny had been an adult who could have chosen to go somewhere else, that would have been another story. As it was, this didn't really work with teen characters.
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