Harmless

I have a feeling that if I were a 14 - 16 year old girl I would have eaten this book with a spoon, and as it was it was a pretty interesting little novel with a Movie of the Week feel to it.

This cautionary tale begins with three unlikely friends in 9th grade, each of whom lie to their parents about where they are going to be when they decide to attend a high school party. To cover their tracks when they arrive home well past the time they should have they concoct a story about an attack being made on them down near a river. They become "heroes" for fighting off their would-be attacker, but after another girl is actually kidnapped and murdered -- and a suspect fitting their vague description is arrested -- things get decidedly more show more complicated.

Not a smash-up read for this 50 year old, but again -- a chewy drama for the audience for whom it was intended! show less

It is a brilliantly written book that grabs the reader’s attention and shows the realistic possibilities of what one lie can do, and what people will do to not get into trouble. I read this book because it seemed dramatic and entertaining.

This story is told through three alternating viewpoints of freshman girls: (Anna (a kind of geeky only child), Emma (has an older brother), and Mariah (wants to be to mature for her age and rebelling against a rich stepfather and her mother who she feels has abandoned her). Anna and Emma are overwhelmed with the new attention that Mariah has been giving them and they go with her to party at her older senior high boyfriend’s house. They get involved in heavy drinking and experimenting with sexual things that they aren’t ready for. When Emma’s parent’s discover that they lied about being at the movies, the girls make up a story about being accosted by a man down by the river, thinking that this lie will cover up where they really show more were. However, this lie leads to interviews with the police, a school assembly on safety, news articles, and eventually a homeless man being arrested for this “crime”. The three girls handle this stress in different ways.

Read no further if you don't want to know how the book turns out. . .

At the end, Emma confesses the lie to a school counselor and the girls are led out of school in handcuffs. Anna is expelled from school, Mariah is sent away to a boarding school, and Emma decides to stay the next year and face the consequences of what she has done. The homeless man forgives the girls.
This would be a very popular book for mature girl readers. The sex and drinking is not done in a graphic way, but the themes of the book are appropriate only for mature readers.
Grade 8 and up. show less

This novel is told from the perspective of three high school girls, Anna, Mariah, and Emma. These girls, totally different in experience and personality, become friends and battle what becomes their deep, dark secret. Anna lives a life according to how her parents want her to live it. She never dares to make a decision that would go against their standards. She is an only child which means her parents have more than enough time to devote their attention to her. Although Anna doesn’t find this a problem, she finds it hard to fit in. Before high school, Emma was in the same situation. Living a lifestyle planned out by her parents wasn’t exactly what she’s had in mind. She’s beginning to test her limits, and even rebel a little. show more What was the cause of the sudden behavior change? Easy, her name is Mariah. Mariah is a “goddess” amongst her fellow classmates. She can get any boy, pull off any look, and is insanely popular. She frightens the upperclassman girls, and wins the hearts of the upperclassman boys. She even has her own boyfriend that goes to a different school, and can drive. Oddly, these girls become best friends. That’s when the trouble begins. It starts off with one white lie and escalades into a series of bigger lies, until finally, the lie that changes their whole life around. show less

I thought this book was a very good older young adult book. Its strengths were in the writing. The author did a great job when speaking from point of view. The characters were well written with great transistion between them. I had no problem following along the sequence of events with having three main characters. The only weakness that I saw was that of the style of writing where language was concerned. I feel that the language about sex in the story was a bit much for me to recommend to a younger high school age student.

This book sucked me in from the start. I loved the plot of it and the characters were great as well. The way that the story was told through three different narrations made it that much better and the characters of Emma, Anna and Mariah were well-developed and ever-changing.

Emma was the one who came up with the story of "something bad" happening to her, as the victim. She had started out as a pretty confident, if isolated because of her best friend, young girl and ends up being the one who's remorseful and having the most trouble with the lies. From the start of each narration, all three girls say that they should/would have told the truth if they could do it again, but I believe that only Emma really would have done so, if not obvious show more by the way the story runs out.

Anna at the beginning seems sincere, but through the eyes of Emma and Mariah, you begin to realize just how dependent she was on her friends and how much popularity means to her. From being the timid and frantic girl, she gains confidence... but not in a good way. She starts to enjoy herself and even fancies condemning an innocent man because she's finally noticed. Although Anna proclaims throughout the entire novel that she would have came out with the truth, I don't believe it. Even when the truth unraveled, you get the feeling that she's going to be the one who'll miss it the most. She was the one who ultimately ran away, unlike Emma.

Mariah was a little harder to decide whether I liked her or not. But I like her complexity. She was a little poor girl, a little rich girl, and ultimately, a girl who's just confused. Although she was like Anna, enjoying the lies, she eventually gets too caught up in it and you get the feeling she wants out.

I hope I didn't exactly spoil it for readers who haven't read this novel yet. It's a great read with a sense of morals behind it. show less

Mark Twain once wrote the only difference between a cat and a lie is that a cat has just nine lives. In Harmless by Dana Reinhardt, three friends (Emma, Anna, and Mariah), who are freshmen girls at a private school, tell their parents a lie so that they can spend the night with three senior boys from the public high school. That lie worked so well they tell another lie that is seemingly simple by comparison-- that they're attending a Jane Austen film at the local theater, when in fact they're back with the senior boys. This works out fine until Anna's parents decide to see the same film at the same time and realize the girls aren't there. Rather than fess up to the truth, the girls decide to lie again. This time they make up a story show more about the three of them being down by the river when a mysterious man attacked Emma, but Anna and Mariah fought him off and they all ran to safety. The story grows and spreads and takes on-- as Twain so aptly put it-- lives of its own. The girls find themselves in a moral dilemna they never imagined possible when they made up a harmless lie. The story builds as we hear from each girl in the first person, so we get the inner thoughts of each girl throughout the book. Harmless is a cautionary tale about the power of words and trust, or alternately the power of lies and what people choose to believe. What I liked about the book was the very different voices each of the characters have, however the quickly alternating narrative was a bit hard to handle in such a short work. This is a cautionary tale of the evil that can come of something as harmless as a little lie, and should have some appeal at the high school level. I wouldn't recommend this title below high school because of the drinking and sex that occur early on, although I don't think either are substantial enough to warrant concern in high school as long as the mentions are taken in context. show less