April Fools by Richie Tankersley Cusick

 

Help! I watched the original 1986 My Little Pony TV show this morning and then followed it up with this 1990 Scholastic publication. My pajamas are tie-dyed and my neighbor is playing rock music that has cowbell in it. WHAT YEAR IS IT???

Okay, but seriously, I am so happy the books from my childhood are making a comeback. There is something so much simpler about these old skool pulpy YAs. Nobody has cell phones and people actually have to talk to each other. It's so refreshing! Plus, the lack of Google on the go makes all of these characters exist in a sort of bubble, which makes for a claustrophobic and isolationist environment. 

Belinda and her two friends, Hildy and Frank, begin this book coming back from an April Fool's party. I've never heard of such a thing but apparently they exist and the three of them are coming back from one, despite one of them being drunk and another one being grounded. Frank has dubbed himself the "king of fools" and decides an excellent prank would be to run the car behind them off the road. Except-- whoops-- he runs them right off a cliff, and then it explodes.

Faster than you can say "I Know What You Did Last Summer," the three of them make a pact swearing themselves to secrecy and that's that. Except it isn't, because Belinda gets hired on for a mysterious tutoring job and the son of her employer is super... uh, weird. He's a disfigured kid who covers all of his mirrors with fabric and lives in the dark, alone with his snakes. Basically, he's a Batman villain in training and about one synapse away from telling Belinda to ask him "how he got his scars."

But Belinda is pretty sure she knows how she got his scars. And she's also pretty sure it's connected to the sinister pranks that someone has started playing on her. The only question is who is doing it and why, because even though Adam "why yes, I do have the Joker as my profile picture" Thorne seems like the obvious candidate, his too-hot-to-be-trusted half-brother, Noel, is also suspicious. So is their stepmom, who casually confides to Belinda that she wishes Adam died in the car wreck that put her husband in the hospital. There's also the butler, Cobbs, who's British and therefore also immediately suspect (British people basically invented the parlor mystery, after all). And let's not forget Frank and Hildy, who seem to think friendship is a free pass for treating someone like a subhuman.

Basically, anyone and everyone in this book is fully capable of evil.

I obviously had to start this book on April Fools' Day since, I mean, it's called APRIL FOOLS. Also, it's written by RTC herself, first of her name, and she is one of my favorite Point Horror novelists. Why? Because her teens actually act like teens, she usually works in a steamy kissing scene or two, the sinister stuff in her book is actually sinister, and there's usually at least two hot but sinister boys. If teen me had gotten her hands on these books back in the day, she would have shipped the villainous boys so hard. RTC knows how to cater to the feminine urge to ship any and all hot villains.

Regarding this book in particular, it was meh. The gothic ambiance was great but Belinda wasn't one of her better heroines. She was kind of TSTL. Also, her friends were awful. Was I actually supposed to care if they made it out alive? Because I was kind of hoping for their demise. They were awful people. The twists were good, though, and I liked the Thorne brothers. Also, Cobbs was the best. (The book actually ends with him telling the heroine he loves her, which I kind of found hilarious. Also, apparently he loves butlering so much he'd do it for free? Did a millionaire write this?)

Not one of RTC's best, but not her worst, either. I stan.

2.5 out of 5 stars