Book Review: Dead Flip by Sara Farizan

Publisher’s description

Edge-of-your-seat YA horror perfect for fans of Stranger Things
 
Growing up, Cori, Maz, and Sam were inseparable best friends, sharing their love for Halloween, arcade games, and one another. Now it’s 1992, Sam has been missing for five years, and Cori and Maz aren’t speaking anymore. How could they be, when Cori is sure Sam is dead and Maz thinks he may have been kidnapped by a supernatural pinball machine?
 
These days, all Maz wants to do is party, buy CDs at Sam Goody, and run away from his past. Meanwhile, Cori is a homecoming queen, hiding her abiding love of horror movies and her queer self under the bubblegum veneer of a high school queen bee. But when Sam returns—still twelve years old while his best friends are now seventeen—Maz and Cori are thrown back together to solve the mystery of what really happened to Sam the night he went missing. Beneath the surface of that mystery lurk secrets the friends never told one another, then and now. And Sam’s is the darkest of all . . .
 
Award-winning author of If You Could Be Mine and Here to Stay Sara Farizan delivers edge-of-your-seat terror as well as her trademark referential humor, witty narration, and insightful characters.

Amanda’s thoughts

You know what? It’s totally fine that the easy reference here is Stranger Things. This is a great book to hand to fans of ST because it feels very familiar to that world and its stories while also being totally its own thing. It’s well-written, I really enjoyed the characters, and it’s mysterious and adventurous all in its own ways. I loved the late 80s/early 90s setting, and I think given the popularity of ST, it’s a world and time that will feel familiar to readers in ways they maybe wouldn’t have found so relatable even just a few years ago. Despite the… do I have to say “historical setting?” Because as a person whose childhood/teen years encompasses this same time period, I don’t like that. But anyway, despite the historical setting (sigh), the relatable problems of changing friendships, crushes, sibling stuff, navigating high school and so on are timeless. And sure, Sam got sucked into a pinball machine for a bunch of years and now has to feed the machine. Less relatable, but no one is saying we need to believe this is possible. It’s fantasy, mixed with lots of reality, and it made for a really fun read. This was a fast-paced read that’s light on the horror and heavy on the paranormal strangeness. Give this fans of “kids on bikes” nostalgia stories full of weirdness and a surprising amount of heart.

Review copy (ARC) courtesy of the publisher

ISBN-13: 9781643750804
Publisher: Workman Publishing Company
Publication date: 08/30/2022
Age Range: 12 – 18 Years

Filed under: Book Reviews