Cold Calls

Three teens, Eric, Shelley and Fatima, are blackmailed into bullying classmates by an online blackmailer who knows a secret that they can't afford to have revealed. The three meet when they are sent to a HABIT (Help Accused Bullies by Inspiring Tolerance) course. When they discover that each has been forced into their situation in the same manner, they determine to try to find the blackmailer. The story is an interesting 'what if' scenario especially in this era of putting much of our lives online. How is it possible to keep ones secrets really secret? Well done suspense.

"So in the end, we're all victims," Eric said.
"Yeah," Shelly said. " And we're all bullies."

A great suspense filled book that seemed to play out pretty realistically.

"I know your secret"

something that terrifies Eric instantly when it's whispered over the phone. So he is pushed and bullied into....well..that's a part of this book.

reading the story as it all unfolds.

I really hope this is a series. I'd love to find out how this all plays out again. And I think the cast of characters are really entertaining and have great individual personalities.

"I know your secret." In Cold Calls, Eric, Fatima, and Shelly all start getting calls from someone with a computer altered voice that blackmails each of them into bullying a particular student in each of their schools. The final event is to be dumping macaroni and cheese onto the head of each student during lunch on a particular Thursday. After running across each other in a weekend antibullying class, the three decide to find out who is making them ruin their lives and why.
This is a very good mystery, giving the reader insight into the personalities of each character, while sharing why each is being blackmailed. However, the characters are difficult to like because of what has happened in their pasts and how they each handled their show more situations. show less

"I know your secret." In Cold Calls, Eric, Fatima, and Shelly all start getting calls from someone with a computer altered voice that blackmails each of them into bullying a particular student in each of their schools. The final event is to be dumping macaroni and cheese onto the head of each student during lunch on a particular Thursday. After running across each other in a weekend antibullying class, the three decide to find out who is making them ruin their lives and why.
This is a very good mystery, giving the reader insight into the personalities of each character, while sharing why each is being blackmailed. However, the characters are difficult to like because of what has happened in their pasts and how they each handled their show more situations. show less

I enjoyed reading this YA story and am thinking it would fit best in the preteen to younger members of the YA community. Older readers would consider it lame. The other category of readers that might be attracted to this book would be the reluctant or non-reader crowd. They might be drawn to the subject matter, keeping secrets and being bullied by peers, and since it is a quick read, the length would not be a stumbling block. If your child is participating in a summer reading project, this, again, might be a good choice: fast read, contemporary theme, phones, texting, computers, selfies, pranks, kids making bad choices, struggle with religious training, family dysfunction, teenage love troubles. My thanks to Goodreads and the author for show more a complimentary copy of this book. show less

This was a fast and thrilling read! Interesting look at the world of bullies, their motives and the price of keeping secrets.

If I could just get past the fact that the person who made the three teens do these acts of bullying DIDN'T actually know the kids, I probably would have liked the book a lot more but I can't. The motivation of Morgan Rouleau just didn't ring true for me - it required too big a leap of faith to get me to believe that she would a) bully three randomly selected strangers just to get back at three people who were mean to her at a theatre camp AND b) that she would have the computer skills to pull it off. It just didn't work for me and because of that I felt kind of cheated when the book came to an end.