After spending time in treatment with other young women like her-who cut, burn, poke, and otherwise hurt themselves-Charlie is released and takes a bus from the Twin Cities to Tucson to be closer to Mikey, a boy she 'like-likes' but who had pined for Ellis instead. Seventeen-year-old Charlie Davis, a white girl living on the margins, thinks she has little reason to live: her father drowned himself her bereft and abusive mother kicked her out her best friend, Ellis, is nearly brain dead after cutting too deeply and she's gone through unspeakable experiences living on the street. 14 & up)Īfter surviving a suicide attempt, a fragile teen isn't sure she can endure without cutting herself. The climax is both inevitable and gripping, and, although Jake longs for the day the spiders retreat for good, the conclusion that he must instead learn to cope with their presence comes as a relief to both readers and protagonist. The author deftly illustrates the impact of Jake's obsessions without relying on exposition readers see through Jake's eyes the paramount importance of maintaining the “magic” and through their own eyes the hours upon hours lost to counting and tapping. Tiny, mundane actions-tapping the beak of a lawn flamingo, touching a grandfather clock-become fraught with tension. Each short chapter begins with the time, the digits of which add, subtract, multiply or divide into a prime number (“OK”) or don't (“Fuck”). The author immerses readers in Jake's anxious reality. And no one but Jake knows that he is constantly at war with the “spiders” in his brain, battling their encroaching, strangling webs by obsessively monitoring and manipulating numbers. Only his sister, Kasey, now a high-school freshman, knows the truth about his family: Money is tight, their mother is mentally ill and their father is running on a constant low boil. On the field, in the hallway and to his one good friend, Luc, Jake is Magic Martin, quirky but respected star soccer player. A compelling entrée into the claustrophobic world of an OCD teen.

Compulsion by heidi ayarbe