What Happened to Cass McBride?
By Gail Giles
New York, Little Brown, 2006, 209p.
Who is Cass McBride and why has a boy named Kyle Kirby buried her alive? What Happened to Cass McBride is a nonstop, chilling tale told from three different perspectives. First is Kyle Kirby who is giving his confession to the police for the crimes he committed against Cass McBride. Next is Cass herself, the popular, attractive junior who always seems to get what she wants. She’s an RP, a “Resume Packer,” who wants to be not only Homecoming Queen but also the Prom Queen and Student Council President because she believes it will help her get into college and meet her father’s lofty expectations. Most of Cass’s side of the story is told from underground, the coffin in which Kyle Kirby has buried her alive with a walkie talkie and an air tube so that he can “torture” her before she dies. The third narrator is Ben, the local police officer in charge of Cass’s case who is desperately trying to find her in the first 48 hours after her kidnapping. The story goes back and forth between these three narrators, leading to an exciting conclusion. Cass uses the business skills she’s cultivated from her callous father to try and manipulate Kyle into letting her out of the box. Listening to his story, Cass discovers that Kyle blames her for his younger brother David’s suicide. She wrote a note to her friend about him shortly after David asked her out. She never intended for David to see her cruel note but he found it.
A day later, he was found dead, hanging from a tree outside his house with a different note pinned to the flesh on his chest. Cass regrets her words but the more she listens to Kyle’s story, the more she realizes she is not the person that belongs in the box. It is Kyle and David’s mother, aka “monster mom,” who destroyed David. She poisoned him with her harsh, cruel words and never showed him the love he deserved. Cass may be a “bitch” but she knows she’s not the one responsible for David’s death.
As he’s telling Cass the story, Kyle also realizes he’s entombed the wrong woman but instead of digging up Cass, Kyle goes straight home to his mother providing an intense climax to the novel. He holds a knife to his mother’s throat and tells her she murdered David with her words and deserves to die. Just as he’s dragging her outside to kill her, the police (having just put the crime together) storm the house and arrest Kyle. He tells them where Cass is buried and a mad dash to save Cass’s life begins.
It may not surprise you that I read this book in about three hours, which is really quite a record for me. It’s a ‘page turner’ to be sure but mostly I just finished it because I didn’t want to have to keep thinking about it. I cared about Cass and I wanted nothing more than for her to be let out of the box so I could go to sleep! There are two critical themes is this book: the power of words and connectivity. These are the same themes addressed by Asher in Thirteen Reasons Why but this book takes ‘connectivity’ to a whole new level. We are all part of a chain and as much as we hate to admit it, what we do and say can drastically affect others in the chain, turning some to take their own life, and some to take the lives of others. It’s hard to imagine why someone would drug, kidnap, and inter one of their peers. It’s hard to imagine what would drive anyone to that level of mental instability. However, Giles does a magnificient job of helping us imagine why that might happen and what we can do to prevent it.
The only major weakness I see in this book is the ending. What happens to Cass at the end? She survives the box but I don’t fully understand the ending. She’s in the psych ward and seems to have lost the concept of time but she writes as if she is completely cognizant. So which is it? (I guess I’ll never know) Also, as a minor weakness, the cover art of this book is not really appealing to me. It’s too strange but perhaps that would appeal to a teen who reads thrillers on a regular basis. I also think this book is appropriate for just about any age of teen, depending on how claustrophobic they are and how many crime dramas they’ve watched on TV. I give this book a 4Q and 3P VOYA rating.
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