In Ecstasy by Kate McCaffrey.

“Ecstasy. I’d always thought I might try it one day. I’d heard kids at school talking about getting wasted on the weekends. They made it sound awesome. I pictured the roughly made tablets with their tiny butterflies. An amazing experience inside a tiny pill.”

Rating: 4/5.

Summary:Mia and Sophie have been best friends forever — but that’s all about to change. Experimenting with drinking, boys and drugs, their friendship is tested to its limits, and they soon find out just how very bad things can be.

Review: This novel was hard hitting, from the very first time Sophie and Mia took ecstasy you knew that things were going to get bad, though, I didn't think that they'd get that bad.

Something about the way Kate McCaffrey wrote this book kept me wanting to turn the next page. There was also something about the way she described things that made them so real, so real that I often felt like I was reading someones biography or their memoirs from their drug crazed days.

The novel is from two perspectives, I found Sophie's more enjoyable at the start, her problems more developed and the way that it was written was more intriguing. Mia's story, just beginning seemed to grab my attention but whenever I hit Sophie's perspective my first thought was: yay. At the end of the novel, I felt differently. Sophie's problems in some ways ending and other just beginning made her perspective less interesting and Mia's problems sky rocketing made her perspective even more interesting. McCaffrey did a very good job at keeping me hooked.

The novel, as you would have already assumed from the title revolves around drugs or more specifically ecstasy. It was very intense and frightening to watch what happened when the girls were under the influence. And I found the process of reading this novel, not only enjoyable, but educational. Reading a novel about this sort of stuff goes into much more depth and teaches you a little more then your health teachers and parents ever could.

“That morning I figured life couldn’t get any better. How could something that made you feel like that be bad for you?”

I found Mia and Sophie very easy to relate to, as the novel progressed, I was in tune with how Sophie was feeling and found her easier to relate to, her reactions to Mia's problem made me think of myself and how I would probably handle the situation the same. The way they thought about themselves and one another was very real.

As terrible as it sounds I love stories about the rising and falling of people in the 'in' crowd. In Ecstasy did a wonderful job of showing how the person on the rise in the group feels and reacts, and how the people already in the group react. How the friendships sour and the opinion of the person on the rise goes from good to bad.

The ending, once again, I got a perfect one. It gave me a little hope for the girls and left a lot up to my own imagination, and actually made me laugh, which was great.

I'm going to give this novel four out of five. It was so real and Kate McCaffrey is a wonderful and inspirational writer and I will be looking out for her other novel Destroying Avalon. I would recommend this novel to anyone, it's one of those books that teenagers should read so that they can understand the dangers of drugs and how easily you can get caught up in them.

--Allie.