“I settle back into the chair and pull the blanket up to my chin. After a while, my eyelids start to droop. I shake my head, trying to wake myself up… Quickly, I take inventory of what I’m touching. Chair, blanket, clothes. So I could slide into anyone who’s sat in this chair recently… I feel myself falling to the floor… I’m in a bedroom – a girl’s bedroom, it looks like. The girl I’ve become cries as though someone ripped her heart in half. She sobs, clutching a lacy blanket, wiping her snot on it. Someone rubs her back. The pressure against her skin moves in circles, this way and that. It feels so good. It feels like everything I should have but don’t.
– Page 39 of ‘Slide’
Vee Bell was diagnosed as narcoleptic soon after her mother died of cancer. But, unlike narcoleptics, Vee slides into the bodies of the people who had recently touched and left an emotional charge on something Vee was touching. Unable to tell anybody what’s going on at risk of them thinking she’s crazy, Vee hides what is both her power and a curse. It doesn’t affect her much other than a bump or two on the head when she falls asleep in a bad position, and some strange stares from classmates that don’t pay her any attention otherwise. It begins to affect her when she slides into the body of someone who has just murdered Vee’s younger sister Mattie’s best friend Sophie and who made it look like a suicide. Another murder is committed and Vee’s conviction that she must do something to prevent the next one increases. She slowly tries to piece together the crimes that everyone is either calling a suicide, or for which someone innocent is suspected.
As she attempts to solve the mystery, she finds it inexplicably linked to people that have caused her pain in the past. She was a cheerleader before becoming an alternative girl, after an incident on homecoming night led her to retreat socially with her best friend Rollins. Two girls that were murdered connect to the boy that changed Vee forever, and who made Sophie’s last hours that much more miserable.
With a crazy twist at the end, and a lot of sadness along the way, ‘Slide’ is intriguing, descriptively written, and very entertaining. Even though the special power plot line is getting a little tired, I’m always impressed when an author manages to make it unique. Jill Hathaway has done just that, and as a result, I would recommend ‘Slide’.
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