True events inspired Lancaster's portrait of an exclusive community that also has one of the country's highest rates of suicide among their high-achieving teens. Told from several different perspectives, the numerous characters are--for the most part--not sufficiently developed, though their relationships and conflicts ring true. The answers to the crisis shaking the community are rather pat and too easily achieved.

When the pressure to excel becomes too much, a group of teens bands together to save each other.At elite North Shore High School, students are expected to be the best of the best; the school has a 98-percent college-attendance rate and wants it to be 100 percent. Driven overachiever Mallory is borderline bulimic from the pressure, while newcomer Simone lets herself be taken in by the drive for success above anything else. Owen refuses to participate, focusing on his nonacademic interests and pot. Best friends Stephen and Kent work hard on their MIT applications, but they handle the stress very differently. What do these different students have in common? They are all affected by the suicides of their fellow students. And when two students in their year kill themselves, everyone decides it's time to change, announced in a few soapbox moments. Will that be enough to save lives when even some of their parents are unwilling to reduce the school pressure on their children for fear of lowering property values? While the students cover a range of attitudes and backgrounds (Mallory is white, Stephen is Korean, Owen is Jewish, and Simone is mixed-race—white and Indian), the answers seem to come too easily, boiling down to supportive parents. An oversimplified take on the profoundly complex problem of teen suicide. (Fiction. 14-18)

Gr 10 Up-orth Shore is a seemingly perfect Illinois town; its motto is "We breed excellence." But underneath the porcelain exterior, there are large cracks in the foundation. The suicide rate for teens is one of the highest in the nation, and each kid is under intense pressure to be the absolute best at academics, sports, and extracurricular activities. To ease the tension, many students turn to partying and opioid abuse, which are all too easy to support using their absent millionaire parents' bars and medicine cabinets. New girl Simone is unsettled by the compulsory perfection. She quickly finds solace in new friends. Her rival is Mallory, who is dating the most popular guy in schooluntil he breaks up with her for Simone. But tragedy rears its ugly head when a beloved student commits suicide, and that event is quickly followed by another. Simone and Mallory are too shattered to be rivals. They create the Gatekeepers Club with the intent to integrate a viable support system into the school to prevent these suicides. A diverse group of teens come together to try to create a positive future. The first half of this best-selling author's YA fiction debut is slow. There is a large cast of characters and alternating perspectives. But as the characters gravitate toward one another, cohesion in the narrative begins to form. This is an adequate read; however, it sometimes lacks the gravitas the subject matter deserves through overuse of inauthentic teen vernacular and underdeveloped characters. VERDICT Recommended as an additional purchase, especially for libraries looking to expand their mental health collections.Melanie Leivers, Palm Beach Country Library System, FL