Glitter by Aprilynne Pike - NO

Glitter (Glitter, #1) by Aprilynne Pike, 367 pages. Random House, 2016. $18.  

Content: Language: PG-13 (56 swears); Mature Content: PG-13; Violence: PG-13.  

BUYING ADVISORY: MS, HS – NO  

AUDIENCE APPEAL: AVERAGE  

Dani is seventeen and is engaged to the king of Versailles.  Dani and her mother witnessed the king killing a girl and blackmailed him to marry Dani, in a dangerous power play.  Dani is desperate to get out of the kingdom of Versailles, which honors the eighteenth-century time period, and break into the modern world.  To break out, however, costs more than Dani can afford, so she decides to sacrifice those in the court for her own freedom by selling them make-up laced with drugs.  

I hated this book.  I couldn’t get over the fact that Dani was addicting people without their knowledge to drugs, for her own freedom and at one point she says she is proud of her new business?!?!  Of dealing drugs?!  Content includes drug use, drug dealing, death from drug overdose and death from suffocation during sex.  Dani has no moral compass and is judgmental about her family members, when she is just as self-serving as they are.  The relationship between Dani and her love interest was insta-love and ridiculous.  The characters have no redeeming qualities, even if the setting is a cool idea.  

Reviewer, C. Peterson