Author: Crissa-Jean Chappell
Release Date: August 2012
Published By: Flux
Pages: 288
Goodreads Rating: 3.58 stars
Review: Seventeen-year-old stoner Aaron Foster was offered a choice: go to jail or turn undercover narc to find the dealer who's funneling drugs into Miami's Palm Hammock High School. To get close to the school's biggest players, Aaron lies to everyone--most of all, the cute but troubled Morgan Baskin. With the Everglades party on Halloween night--and a planned drug bust there--just days away, Aaron realizes that he's falling hard for Morgan... and trying to protect her could cost him everything.
NARC opened with an interesting premise and a fast-paced plot, but it ultimately left me disappointed. Even though the actual concept was certainly intriguing, a good book needs not only a great plot but great characters as well, and it was this latter category that failed for me. There wasn't anything particularly wrong with Aaron, Morgan, or Haylie, but they didn't stand out either.
More importantly, their motivations weren't that believable to me. For example, Aaron was purportedly struggling with this issue of whether or not it's ethical for him to be working with the police against the people at his high school. However, the few scenes that attempted to portray him having difficulty with this seemed too rushed to me and didn't really give as much insight into his character as they could have.
I also didn't think their interactions went as well as they could have. The various character relationships seemed forced rather than real, and I didn't always find them believable. I feel like if maybe some more time was spent on developing these relationships, they could have been fleshed out a lot more and provided a better sense of the characters to the reader.
All in all, NARC had a lot of promise but ultimately left me feeling disconnected. Even though the plot was interesting, I just couldn't feel anything about the characters. Their interactions and motivations were unreal to me and definitely could have been a lot better. I still look forward to reading other books by the author but I would not recommend this particular one.
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