THE INVITATION by Diane Hoh

PUBLISHER: Scholastic, 1991
GENRE: Young Adult Fiction/Horror
SETTING: USA
SERIES: Point Horror, #20
PURCHASE: link
MY GRADE: A-

FROM PUBLISHER: Five not-so-popular teens are invited to an annual party given by snooty Cass. Ushered into the mansion, they are soon part of a human scavenger hunt.

MY THOUGHTS: I was pleasantly surprised by this. Sarah is a high school junior. She and friends Eleanor, Maggie, Shane (female), and Donald are all very likable. Some are excited to go to wealthy Cass Rockham's party and it turns out to be a horrible decision. Cass is cruel but I like her anyway. She sure has a dark mind.

The teenage villain was pretty creative and sophisticated to have come up with such a revenge scheme. I loved that there were monitors in the rooms to film those in them. I wish their reason for revenge had been darker; instead it was just immature. Of course it's not plausible that this could ever really happen.

MOTHER'S HELPER by A. Bates

PUBLISHER: Scholastic, 8/1991
GENRE: Young Adult Fiction/Thriller
SETTING: Washington, USA
PURCHASE: link
MY GRADE: C

FROM PUBLISHER: Becky can hardly believe her luck when she's offered a job as a mother's helper on a holiday island. She can work on her tan and earn money at the same time. It's the perfect holiday job, or so Becky thinks.

MY THOUGHTS: This wasn't as good as I'd hoped. We were presented with two possible villains. One was Patricia Nelson, whom Becky is working for for the whole summer as a nanny to her one-year-old son, Devon. We really needed background information on Patricia. The other was an eighteen-year-old guy named Cleve Davidson. I was leaning more towards one of them as being the villain because things just weren't adding up with them so that's why I'd settled on that person, and I ended up being right.

Becky's a good mature character, and good at caring for Devon, but she's too credulous. At the end of the novel she did something I don't agree with. That action also set this up for a sequel but there wasn't one.

There were a few things that annoyed me in this story. A physical description of Becky wasn't given. Patricia would lock her bedroom door to keep Becky out yet didn't bother to unplug the telephone that was in the room so it couldn't ring like crazy, even when she knew the constant ringing bothered Becky. And I'm not sure how Patricia's ex could know her phone number. I was under the impression she was only renting the cabin for the summer so there was no reason to give him the phone number because they weren't in contact with each other. And if the only phone was locked in the bedroom, how was Becky supposed to stay in contact with her parents?

The time span felt like only a few days. These 'point horror' novels are horror but this one was actually just a thriller.