Monday's Not Coming

 Monday's Not Coming by Tiffany D. Jackson, 448 pages.

Claudia has one friend, and when she doesn't show up for the first day of school she starts to worry (Monday never misses a day of school). When she doesn't show up after a week she knows something is wrong. When she starts asking questions she quickly realizes that the answers aren't adding up. She also realizes that she seems to be the only one who cares about what happened to Monday Charles. As the months go by and Monday stays missing she has to balance learning to live without her best friend with trying to find out what happened to her.

This book reminds me a lot of Jackson's book Grown in both positive and negative ways. Both combine slow-building dread with the emotional equivalent of a gut punch. Both also contain a last minute twist that ends up making the whole book weaker overall. This is a pretty solid book, just don't let the fact that it's a young adult novel fool you, it's emotionally really tough to read.