In the instant before I make contact, the sludge shifts and bubbles under me and I'm knocked forward against the coffin lid. The jolt rocks her head to the side, but the red hair and the flap of skin that is her scalp stay put. "Naked" is the word my brain vomits. Her head is hairless. Skinned. Scalped. The membrane that she should be wearing as a crown is disconnected, limp in the mud, only placed near so it might look as though she's in one piece. 
 This book has a similar premise as In the Woods, one of my favorite books of all time. Children wander into the woods for an innocent afternoon of play. Only one emerges. The other missing, never to be found. The survivor now leads a normal life, seemingly well-adjusted, popular, but scars are hidden underneath until an event re-triggers the trauma. It is one of the better YA mysteries that I've ever read. 
 Seventeen year old Stella is the lucky one. Or so everyone tells her. You see, eleven years ago, Stella and her classmate Jeanie wandered into the woods. Stella was the only one that came out. Now, Stella is still living. Considered the lucky one. She is beautiful, popular--ironically, her mysterious past contributes to her popularity instead of making her an outcast. 
 Since my freshman year, my infamy as "the one who got away" has earned me an epic amount of popularity. I guess it could have turned out differently. If I'd been all morbid and gone goth in steel-toed boots and a safety pin through my eyebrow, then it would have turned me into a social pariah. Given that I'm more skinny jeans and ballet flats, am pretty with bright-green eyes, and have a monopoly on the whole survivor thing, my past has only added legend to my social status. It's like those castles and forts you learn about in history that are glimmering museums full of tourists now but used to be leper colonies. That's me, former leper colony. 
 Stella has a very grudging attitude about the survivor, and she makes the best of her life. She has wonderful friends, the sparkling, effervescent Zoey and the scholastic Michaela. She's just a normal teenager---but despite her popularity, despite the fact that she's, well, alive, a part of her is bitter about being the survivor. She is living under the shadow of her past, under the weight of a dead girl 
 There's a burden to being the one left behind, even though I don't remember a pinch of it. A weight always pressing down on me, like Jeanie's lifeless body is forever hitching a piggyback, steering me with her sticky hands coiled in my hair. I can't escape her, and I resent it. 
 That aside, life is pretty normal. Stella is just a normal teenager. She doesn't really know what she wants to be. She doesn't think too much about the future. She loves her friend. She flirts with boys. She just wants to have a good time. Until a fateful party on the anniversary of Jeanie's disappearance, a night the teenagers at her high school morbidly name The Day of Bones literally unearth a body. The discovery of a body triggers a desperation in Stella--could this be Jeanie at last? She runs towards it, digs through long-dead bodies buried in graves...until she comes across a freshly killed corpse. 
 All the things that should stay hidden at cemeteries are unearthed by the mudslide. Coffins exposed, either swept downhill by the slide or jutting at sharp angles from the ground like compound bone fractures piercing skin. Jaundiced partial skeletons litter the soil. 
 I must look like I've lost my mind as I sink down to my hands and knees. The slimy soil squishes and bubbles under me. I crawl carefully, so the earth doesn't swallow me up. I choke back vomit as my hand brushes what I know is a human skull. Bones. Decomposed flesh. Eyeballs. Brain matter. Maggots. All the gross things that are likely in this soil seep into my hands and knees. But I have to get to that body. I have to make sure that it is a body and that I'm not seeing things. That I haven't lost every last ounce of sanity I had. 
 There is a killer on the loose. Is there a connection between Stella's past and the present murder? 
 I absolutely loved Rob in this book's adult counterpart, In the Wood. While I didn't feel the same love for Stella, I really like her as a character. She's not perfect. She's just a normal teenager who wants to just forget it and not live under the weight of a dead girl. I liked her attitude. She presents a good image, but there's a part of her that's not so nice, and that's the part to which I relate. We can't all be saints, and we can't ascribe goodness to someone just because they've survived something horrible. She didn't like Jeanie back then and she still doesn't. She feels bad that Jeanie disappeared, but it sucks living up to the image of the survivor. 
 Because if I'm being honest, Jeanie probably would have grown up to be nothing more than average. She was chunky at six, her fleshy cheeks nearly swallowing up her pinprick eyes. While all the other kindergarteners were learning to read, she couldn't write her own name. She was the alto with a lisp in a pack of singsongy chirping little girls. I know you shouldn't say nasty things about the dead, but since she never had the chance to become something, it's unfair that everyone assumes that if she had, it would have been bright and shiny. At six Jeanie was one of those dull pennies forgotten on the sidewalk that everyone steps over but no one stoops to pick up; she wouldn't have been a diamond at seventeen. 
 I like that part of her that's like "dude, it's in the past, let me move on, I don't give a fuck." 
 Stella is kind of a mean girl, but she's just trying to maintain her image. She is careless, and when she is cruel, she does have her doubts. I feel like she's a realistic character, and that's what makes the book for me. The mystery was well-written. The romance is not overwhelming. It was a solid, enjoyable book.