Book: Afterparty by Ann Redisch Stampler

Published January 2014 by Simon Pulse|297 pages

Where I Got It: I borrowed the e-book from the library

Series: None

Genre: YA Contemporary

Emma is tired of being good. Always the dutiful daughter to an overprotective father, she is the antithesis of her mother — whose name her dad won’t even say out loud. That’s why meeting Siobhan is the best thing that ever happened to her…and the most dangerous. Because Siobhan is fun and alluring and experienced and lives on the edge. In other words, she’s everything Emma is not.

And it may be more than Emma can handle.

Because as intoxicating as her secret life may be, when Emma begins to make her own decisions, Siobhan starts to unravel. It’s more than just Dylan, the boy who comes between them. Their high-stakes pacts are spinning out of control. Elaborate lies become second nature. Loyalties and boundaries are blurred. And it all comes to a head at the infamous Afterparty, where debauchery rages and an intense, inescapable confrontation ends in a plummet from the rooftop…

This explosive, sexy, and harrowing follow-up to Ann Redisch Stampler’s spectacular teen debut, Where It Began, reveals how those who know us best can hurt us most.

I really wanted to like Afterparty, but instead, I found it was weird and frustrating.

One of my issues with it is that we’re told how her dad is over-protective.  We don’t really see it much, and it was a little hard to believe that he was as over-protective as she made him out to be. He’s the parent, so he can be as protective as he wants, but unfortunately, their relationship isn’t really shown very well, and I wish it were shown better.  Still, I feel for him, with his wife, who died from overdosing, and how Emma acted.

It is pretty predictable- good girl meets bad girl, does really stupid things in order to make said best friend happy, until there’s that one thing where the good girl realizes she can’t be friends with her friend anymore.  It was pretty tired, and there wasn’t a twist to make it interesting.  It was so frustrating to see her make stupid decisions, and how she couldn’t see how messed up Siobhan was. And how, no matter what happened with Siobhan, she kept going back to her.  I get why Emma would find Siobhan so appealing, and why she acted the way she did, especially if her dad is as bad as she says, but it was still frustrating.

I also felt like Emma’s relationship with Dylan was really shallow, as was his backstory.  I didn’t get the whole thing with his family preferring his brother, and I’m not sure if maybe I missed something (which I doubt), or if it just wasn’t explained well.  I think Dylan, like the other characters (except for maybe the dad) needed a lot more development.

1 star.  I couldn’t get into it, and it was frustrating and underdeveloped.