Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books

In a desperate attempt to bring Natalie out of her grief after her boyfriend dies in a car accident, Natalie's parents take her and three of her friends on a cruise. There she meets a charismatic boy who awakens her interest, but he disappears after their first encounter, and rumors of a person going overboard begin to circulate. Natalie is determined to figure out what's become of him, so she contacts and kind of falls for his equally charismatic twin brother, but his answers to her questions only make the enigma of his brother more complex. Meanwhile, Natalie mulls over her feelings about her relationship with her boyfriend, which wasn't as idyllic as she convinced herself it was, framing her process in the two-line scripts her film teacher assigned the girls to complete on their vacation. Characters are sketchily drawn, but that's a forgivable sin given that pace and mystery are what's really important for impact here. What seems at first like a fairly predictable grief-healed-by-new-love plot takes a blink-and-you'll-miss-it twist at the end, worthy of the intertextual references to Hitchcock that thread through the novel.