My Best Friend's Exorcism

Book 20 of my 2017 Reading Challenge
read from March 13 - 22

My Best Friend's Exorcism by Grady Hendrix

Summary (via Goodreads)
Abby and Gretchen have been best friends since fifth grade, when they bonded over a shared love of E.T., roller-skating parties, and scratch-and-sniff stickers. But when they arrive at high school, things change. Gretchen begins to act...different. And as the strange coincidences and bizarre behavior start to pile up, Abby realizes there's only one possible explanation: Gretchen, her favorite person in the world, has a demon living inside her. And Abby is not about to let anyone or anything come between her and her best friend. With help from some unlikely allies, Abby embarks on a quest to save Gretchen. But is their friendship powerful enough to beat the devil?

My Opinion
So many points for originality.  This was definitely not like anything I'd read before, it was so easy to get sucked into, and I look forward to reading the author again.  The format was great too, like a yearbook with lots of inscriptions and doodles.  I'm not sure if the electronic version would have that so I recommend finding a print copy to get the full experience.  The title of each chapter was the name of a song so I started each one with a little memory pop as an added bonus.

I didn't love the fallout after the exorcism; the way everything played out fell flat for me.  Also, I didn't notice as I was reading but now that I'm thinking about it, there were some loose threads that I would've liked resolution on.

This was a great description of friends growing apart: "There was no falling-out, no great tragedy, just a hundred thousand trivial moments they didn't share, each one an inch of distance between them, and eventually those inches added up to miles."  

A Few Quotes from the Book
"Something was changing inside Gretchen. Maybe it was the acid, maybe it was Andy, maybe it was her parents, maybe it was something worse. Whatever it was, Abby had to keep trying. She couldn't abandon her friend because soon Gretchen would be ready to talk. Any minute now she'd look up from her daybook and say, "I have to tell you something serious.""

"Turning eighteen doesn't determine when you become an adult in Charleston...The day you become an adult is the day you learn that in Charleston, the worse something is, the less attention it receives."