Skip to main content

Paris Pan Takes the Dare by Cynthea Liu

Paris Pan Takes the Dare
by Cynthea Liu
Jr. Fiction

Paris Pan is the new girl in school and she isn’t very excited about it. She moves to Nowheresville, Oklahoma, her school is tiny, and everyone who lives there has to play on the basketball team. Oh and did I mention that her family is a little crazy. Her dad travels to work and is gone for weeks at a time, her mom works like crazy and still calls Paris Baby, and sometimes her siblings are just plain mean to her.

On the first day of school Paris is relieved to get a note from a girl named Mayo asking her if she would like to be friends. It is Mayo’s birthday and for it they are going to reenact the dare. Years ago a girl went into the woods for a dare and was never seen alive again. After years and years of searching for her, finally a few of her bones were found. What really happened to her was a mystery. Many thought that perhaps a serial killer was living in the woods and waiting to strike again, others thought maybe a wild animal had gotten to her, while others thought she had drowned. There is also the fact that Paris thinks she has seen her ghost and the missing girl’s dolls randomly show up. Paris wants to do the dare with her new friends to be accepted, but she is scared and other friends try to warn her away from doing it. This is an exciting book that is a thriller (not that scary though) and mystery all at the same time. Through it all Paris learns how to discover who her true friends are and to appreciate her family more.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Review: The Factory

The Factory By Catherine Egan New York, NY : Scholastic Inc., 2025. Fiction. 306 pages.  Thirteen-year-old Asher Doyle has been invited to join the Factory, a secretive research facility in the desert which ostensibly extracts renewable energy from the electromagnetic fields of its young recruits. But Asher soon realizes something sinister is going on. Kids are getting sick. The adults who run the Factory seem to be keeping secrets. And the extraction process is not only painful and exhausting, but existentially troubling. Asher makes a handful of new friends who help him with an investigation that turns into a resistance, which turns into...a cliffhanger! The Factory is a page-turning sci-fi with multidimensional characters, an intriguing plot, and refreshingly straight-forward writing. Egan weaves in detail about climate crises and social unrest, making the story's dystopian setting feel rich and plausible. With its sophisticated themes and accessible storytelling, I would recomm...

Review: A Strange Thing Happened in Cherry Hall

A Strange Thing Happened in Cherry Hall By Jasmine Warga New York: Harper, 2024. Fiction. 211 pages. A painting has been stolen from the Penelope L. Brooks Museum and sixth-grader Rami Ahmed is worried he's the main suspect. His mother works at the museum as the lead custodian and Rami spends a lot of time hanging out at the museum while she works. On the day the painting went missing, the only people there were the security guard Ed, the cleaning crew, and Rami. Then, a mysterious girl appears in the museum. She floats around from room to room and only Rami can see her -- and she looks exactly like the girl from the missing painting. To prove his innocence and help figure out who the floating girl is, Rami partners up with an aspiring sleuth at school named Veda and the two dive into unexpected situations as they try to solve the mystery. This is a cozy mystery that is focused mostly on characters and ambiance and only a little on the mystery itself. Don't read this book if yo...

Review: The Amazing Generation

The Amazing Generation: Your Guide to Fun and Freedom in a Screen-Filled World Written by Jonathan Haidt and Catherine Price  Illustrated by Cynthia Yuan Cheng New York: Rocky Pond Books, 2025. Informational. 226 pages.  In a kid-friendly adaptation of his best-selling book, The Anxious Generation , Jonathan Haidt teams up with Catherine Price, author of How to Break Up With Your Phone , to bring the power of good information directly to the hands of those that this issue affects most directly — kids on the cusp of getting their own smartphones. The book presents information about the drawbacks of having a smartphone and social media too soon in clear and easy-to-understand language, with eye-catching graphics and pop-outs. Throughout the book, quotes from real teens and young adults, called screen "rebels" by the authors, emphasize the points the authors are trying to make. Fictional characters are featured throughout in a graphic novel story, which further emphasizes the po...