HANDCUFFS

After 16-year-old Parker Prescott is caught by her parents in a pair of handcuffs with the hottest boy at school, she is grounded indefinitely. This gives her endless time to ruminate about her family’s recent financial downfall, her perfect older sister’s failing marriage, her little brother’s ADHD and her tortured past with unnamed Hottie, with whom she is unhealthily obsessed. She also has to contend with a hateful classmate blogging lies about her, the question of whether or not she will lose her virginity to badboy Hottie and what will happen if she does. The author tries to create an atmosphere of claustrophobic obsession with Parker’s densely written present-tense moment-by-moment narration. But the result is an interminable list of repetitive thoughts that often slow the action to a standstill. The sluggish climax and too-neat ending will cause patient readers who hung in for all 300-plus pages to feel that they received little reward for Herculean effort. Overwritten and under-plotted. (Fiction. 14 & up)