Official Blurb:
It’s the summer before senior year for best friends Tolly Driver and Amber Dennison. They’re not in the marching band, they’re not in the FFA – they don’t really count. Amber’s the only Native student in town, and Tolly’s only on the radar due to his father’s recent death.
This is all about to change.
Review:
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Bloody, gory, heartbreaking, funny, and full of 1980s nostalgia. The story of Tolly Driver is told in a stream-of-conscioiusness style memoir of a reluctant “slasher”. Tolly and Amber are the best of friends, facing the doldrums of West Texas high school together. Tolly is a likable enough guy, if a bit stupid, and Amber is witty and sarcastic and honestly my favorite part of the book as a whole.
Amber and Tolly decide to crash a classmate’s party, where Tolly, still grieving the loss of his father in a tragic car accident, gets very drunk and makes a general ass of himself. As a result, some members of the marching band decide to “teach him a lesson” by strapping him to a lawn chair with their belts (this is important) and forcing him to drink something. It’s only after he’s swallowed the liquid that Tolly realizes that there are peanuts in the drink.
Something I should say here: Tolly is deathly allergic to peanuts.
It is unknown whether the marching band knew that the drink contained the peanuts, but that doesn’t matter in the world of “slasher logic”.
I won’t spoil anything else here, because it’s honestly just such a wild and exhilarating ride to be taken on that I hope y’all decide to experience it for yourselves.
CW: Violence, gore, murder, mentions of suicidal ideation, parent death, mental instability, vivid description of anaphylactic shock, references to racism
