This is book one of The Candidates series and follows the main character Callie (Calliope) Laws as summer ends and her best friend and next door neighbour Isaac, leaves for college and she has to return to school. But not as a student, but as an administrative assistant in the Montrose High school office. Her future has long been set as that of her mother’s dreams, a dancer, but this is something she has been lately realising, is not her dream anymore. She has injured her foot, whether this was deliberately or an accident, she isn’t sure. Maybe her subconscious was trying to tell her something. She has to wear a moonboot and her mother and dance instructor are keen to get her back training for her audition for a dance school. She hasn’t raised the courage to tell her mom never mind even her best friend that she doesn’t feel the intense urge to do dance as a career anymore.
Her new job is not exactly all consuming and to keep her mind occupied, she looks out the window a lot. She sees strange things happen outside the health centre opposite. A hiker’s body had recently been found in the National Park nearby and now there was another teen missing, but she could swear she had just seen him outside, as another man got a Taser to his body. When she tries to discuss it days later, she is told the teen died days before she saw him, so she must have imagined it! She has to take letters and items across to the health centre and has a run in with its weird manager, Logan Kerry, who she is sure she has just caught drinking on the job.
An interesting tale of high school behaviour pushed to the extreme, mixed in with an organisation with a sick plot to test their product on. Looks like the next book in the series will be revealing a lot about who is really behind all of this and why. I look forward to reading it soon. I received an ARC copy of this book from BookSprout and I have freely given my own opinion of the book above.