Killing November

Killing November by Adriana Mather is another one of this year’s Rosie nominees. The novel follows the main character, November, as she navigates her new—completely off the grid—school. They have no showers, electricity, internet, or cell phones, and have an eye-for-an-eye punishment system. The classes offered don’t fit with those an average 17-year-old girl would be taking. While at her home in Pembroke, she would have been taking math, English, science, and electives such as a foreign language, or maybe even a computer science class, but here she is taking knife throwing, poisons, historical analysis, and the art of deception. To make matters worse, she is encouraged to provide very little information about her upbringing. While this is her first year at the school, her classmates have been studying these skills for years to become assassins or whatever else their families might need them to be. Here, competition is everything. And when a student is murdered, November has to do her best to fit into the bizarre curriculum and figure out who the murder is before she becomes the next victim. Overall, this is probably one of my favorite books on this year’s list. While at first I thought the writing dragged on, I soon found it captivating and quickly found the sequel to see how everything would play out. (4.18/5 stars on Goodreads)