The Gatekeepers

by Jen Lancaster

Overview

“How could we know that forever could end at seventeen?”

Anyone passing through North Shore, Illinois, would think it was the most picture-perfect place ever, with all the lakefront mansions and manicured hedges and iron gates. No one talks about the fact that the brilliant, talented kids in town have a terrible history of throwing themselves in front of commuter trains.

Meet Simone, the bohemian transfer student from London, who is thrust into the strange new reality of an American high school; Mallory, the hypercompetitive queen bee; and Stephen, the first-generation genius who struggles with crippling self-doubt. Each one is shocked when a popular classmate takes his own life…except not too shocked. It’s happened before. With so many students facing their own demons, can they find a way to save each other—as well as themselves?

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781488027826
Publisher:	Harlequin
Publication date:	10/10/2017
Sold by:	HARLEQUIN
Format:	eBook
Pages:	304
File size:	3 MB
Age Range:	13 - 17 Years

About the Author

JEN LANCASTER is a New York Times bestselling author who has sold well over a million books. From Bitter Is the New Black to The Tao of Martha, Jen has made a career out of documenting her attempts to shape up, grow up and have it all—sometimes with disastrous results. Her novel Here I Go Again received three starred reviews (Kirkus Reviews, Booklist and Publishers Weekly). Her memoir I Regret Nothing was named an Amazon Best Book of the Year, and she’s regularly a finalist in the Goodreads Choice Awards.
Jen has appeared on The Today Show, as well as CBS This Morning, Fox News, NPR All Things Considered and The Joy Behar Show, among others. She lives in Chicago with her husband and her many dogs and cats. Visit her website, jenlancaster.com, and find her on Twitter, @altgeldshrugged.

Editorial Reviews

10/01/2017
Gr 10 Up—North Shore is a seemingly perfect Illinois town; its motto is "We breed excellence." But underneath the porcelain exterior, there are large cracks in the foundation. The suicide rate for teens is one of the highest in the nation, and each kid is under intense pressure to be the absolute best at academics, sports, and extracurricular activities. To ease the tension, many students turn to partying and opioid abuse, which are all too easy to support using their absent millionaire parents' bars and medicine cabinets. New girl Simone is unsettled by the compulsory perfection. She quickly finds solace in new friends. Her rival is Mallory, who is dating the most popular guy in school—until he breaks up with her for Simone. But tragedy rears its ugly head when a beloved student commits suicide, and that event is quickly followed by another. Simone and Mallory are too shattered to be rivals. They create the Gatekeepers Club with the intent to integrate a viable support system into the school to prevent these suicides. A diverse group of teens come together to try to create a positive future. The first half of this best-selling author's YA fiction debut is slow. There is a large cast of characters and alternating perspectives. But as the characters gravitate toward one another, cohesion in the narrative begins to form. This is an adequate read; however, it sometimes lacks the gravitas the subject matter deserves through overuse of inauthentic teen vernacular and underdeveloped characters. VERDICT Recommended as an additional purchase, especially for libraries looking to expand their mental health collections.—Melanie Leivers, Palm Beach Country Library System, FL

School Library Journal

In the affluent Chicago suburb of North Shore, high school students are highly competitive, anxiety ridden, and cliquey. The ensemble of narrators brings the main characters to life, emulating attitudes and teenage angst. Simone, a transplant from Britain, has poise and self-assurance, while Mallory is highly competitive to the point of being neurotic about her health, weight, and athleticism. The teenage boys include geeky Steven, Owen, and Kent, each sweet and somewhat insecure, and footballer Braden. The narrators bring the characters to life as they deal with drugs, suicide, parental neglect, and life in those uncomfortable teen years. Listening to this novel takes one back to high school. M.B.K. © AudioFile 2017, Portland, Maine

DECEMBER 2017 - AudioFile

2017-08-02
When the pressure to excel becomes too much, a group of teens bands together to save each other.At elite North Shore High School, students are expected to be the best of the best; the school has a 98-percent college-attendance rate and wants it to be 100 percent. Driven overachiever Mallory is borderline bulimic from the pressure, while newcomer Simone lets herself be taken in by the drive for success above anything else. Owen refuses to participate, focusing on his nonacademic interests and pot. Best friends Stephen and Kent work hard on their MIT applications, but they handle the stress very differently. What do these different students have in common? They are all affected by the suicides of their fellow students. And when two students in their year kill themselves, everyone decides it's time to change, announced in a few soapbox moments. Will that be enough to save lives when even some of their parents are unwilling to reduce the school pressure on their children for fear of lowering property values? While the students cover a range of attitudes and backgrounds (Mallory is white, Stephen is Korean, Owen is Jewish, and Simone is mixed-race—white and Indian), the answers seem to come too easily, boiling down to supportive parents. An oversimplified take on the profoundly complex problem of teen suicide. (Fiction. 14-18)

Kirkus Reviews