false 38731251 650176 228334 1573221643 9781573221641 20 http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1172885725m/228334.jpg http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1172885725s/228334.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/228334.Innocence 3.36 95 Following the quiet wedding of Pamela and Beckett's father, held in the apartment, Beckett opens her bathroom door to find the toilet full of blood. At once she recognizes the blood as "a sacred symbol, a message, a warning, a sign." In fear, she imagines it spilling over the bowl, splashing her hands and face. "Then the fear dies down," Beckett explains, "and I see that the blood is just a liquid, nothing but a surprise. But as the loud, throaty sound of the flush fills my head and I turn off the light, I know that the blood means something. I know that the blood is not just a surprise. I know that it is meant for me." Using Carol Clover's concept of the final girl--the one who survives by learning to kill--in slasher films, Jane Mendelsohn (I Was Amelia Earhart) offers a brilliant and sinister vision of a schoolgirl's loss of innocence. As for the virgin suicides, the bats, the bloody bundles in the freezer, the reader comes to realize, with Beckett, that it doesn't matter what is real, only what is true. --Regina Marler

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