** spoiler alert ** 
 Something is wrong with Mara Dyer -- and ever since a disastrous night that left three other teens dead, nobody has known just what. But the question of exactly what is wrong in Mara Dyer's life -- madness, ghostly visitations or something more sinister -- lies at the heart of Michelle Hodkin's "The Unbecoming of Mara Dyer," the first book of a haunting urban fantasy trilogy that carefully crafts a chilling web of experiences and strange "coincidences." 
 Mara Dyer wakes in the hospital, remembering nothing of how she came to be there. But she's told that she and three other teenagers -- her best friend Rachel, Rachel's snipey new friend Claire, and Claire's brother Jude -- were in an old asylum when the building collapsed. The other three were killed. 
 To help Mara overcome the trauma, her family pulls up stakes and moves to Miami, where she's enrolled in an elite private school -- but she's also being haunted by visions of Jude, auditory hallucinations and amnesia about the night Rachel was killed. She also attracts the notice of the snarky school Casanova, Noah Shaw, who seems fascinated by the one girl in school determined to be uninterested in him -- and of course, Mara finds him attractive despite her disdain for his love life. 
 But strange things are happening around Mara as she tries to rearrange her life into some kind of normalcy -- people have started dying in bizarre ways, exactly as she sees it in her mind. Also, her lawyer dad has taken on a notorious murder case. As Mara desperately tries to remember what happened to her on that fateful night, she and Noah discover that they have much more in common than they think -- and that Mara is much more dangerous than she knows. 
 One of the most important aspect of "The Unbecoming of Mara Dyer" is that Michelle Hodkin takes her sweet time revealing what exactly is happening to Mara -- there's no "a-ha, here's the supernatural thing that makes me special!" moment early on. Instead, most of the book unfolds with a painfully accurate depiction of mental illness and personal trauma, but with a mysterious aspect; we're never entirely sure whether Mara is mentally unbalanced, is being haunted by something, or if something else is going on with her. 
 And as such, the book has a haunting, unnerving quality that pervades it from beginning to end; some scenes have an eerie unreality even if nothing explicitly supernatural is happening. Hodkin's lush first-person writing allows us to get inside Mara's swirling thoughts and emotions effortlessly, and she does a good job interspersing the everyday school life and family life Mara deals with (including an overprotective mom, a vicious Spanish teacher and a pair of bullies) with the strange and bizarre (visions of Jude, unexplained deaths, a strange incident involving Mara scalding herself). 
 Mara herself is a captivating heroine -- she's a mixture of dark fragility and iron-clad strength, the kind of girl who can wade into alligator-infested waters one minute and melt down from anxiety the next. Hodkin walks the tightrope between fragility and strength effortlessly, so that Mara feels like a realistic girl who is struggling with serious emotional issues and mental problems without losing her sense of self. And when the truth about what happened that night is revealed, it adds a wild, dark edge to her character and personality. 
 She also doesn't succumb to hormones as quickly as most urban fantasy heroines -- while she's obviously attracted to Noah, it's the gradual glimmers of who he truly is (under all the snark and sex jokes) that slowly wins her over. Noah himself is as enigmatic as such a character should be, since he initially seems like just another annoying-but-hot teen boy, but gradually reveals that there are dimensions to his personality and abilities that Mara never even dreamed of. 
 Michelle Hodkin's debut novel is a haunting, wildly unnerving little ride that plays its cards close to its chest, slowly unfolding the mystery that is Mara Dyer. And of course, it leaves you hanging on a cliffhanger.