My body ached and my face was sore – I guess from smiling so much. I don’t remember ever laughing more. A new world had opened up for me, a place where I was confident and beautiful and a hot guy like Lewis wanted to be with me. That morning I figured life couldn’t get any better. How could something that made you feel like that be bad for you?
Mia and Sophie are best friends. They do everything together, and always have. So when they go to a party and are offered ecstasy, both girls take the plunge and pop a pill. For Mia, taking ecstasy seems to open up a whole new world. Her shyness disappears and she becomes vivacious, beautiful, popular. But as her social circle grows and her new relationship with Lewis -a year twelve boy – blossoms, her friendship with Sophie suffers.
Kate McCaffrey is an author who not only deals with teen issues, but deals with them head-on in a way which is both confronting and realistic. In her previous novel, Destroying Avalon she explored cyber bullying. Here, she tackles the growing issue of teenage drug use. Rather than trying to simply explore the consequences of drug taking, McCaffrey takes readers inside the life of the teen characters, showing why they make the decisions do. For Mia, using ecstasy and other drugs seems to offer a solution to her problems, rather than being a problem itself. For her friend Sophie, ecstasy is also a temptation, but her experiences are different. Sophie has her own set of problems to deal with.
This is a gritty novel on an important subject.
In Ecstasy, by Kate McCaffrey
Fremantle Press, 2008