“Bliss” – By Lauren Myracle – The Rebekah Koontz Site

“Sure to cause goose bumps all the way to the dramatic and surprising end.” – School Library Journal

Bliss is a chilling story of racism, murder, and an ugly desire for a power beyond what we can see.

Lauren Myracle has ingeniously intertwined these three gripping topics to being a teenage girl in the 1960s.

“Bones, says a voice in my head, Tombs.

I stop dead in my tracks, because it’s not my voice that whispered these thoughts. And whoever’s voice it is, it’s not a nice voice.”

Bliss is a fourteen-year-old girl who was raised by her hippy parents on a convent. That is, until her parents decide to pick up and leave to Canada, dumping Bliss on her well-to-do grandmother in Atlanta, where she is expected to bathe, and study, and cross her legs at the ankle.

Walking by one of the old, ivy-covered buildings of Crestview Academy, Bliss hears a voice that makes her hair stand on end. It’s ugly, and it wants. Bliss does her best to shut her mind to it.

What she doesn’t know is that there is an obsession festering in the heart of someone who wants just as badly. And it will be Bliss who unwittingly gives the voice what it hungers for most — a blood sacrifice.

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This book is both creepy and complex on the basis of racism and morality.

It can be hard to understand, if you’re my age, the twinge of corruption that no doubt grated the nerves of many when seeing someone mistreated for the color of their skin. Myracle does an excellent job in professing that.

When you shut a book—shudders skipping across your skin—that book did what books are supposed to do: make you feel something.

Five stars.