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I devoured Rosoff’s brisk and compelling young adult novel in just a little more than one sitting. Narrated in crisp, snappy prose by an unnamed seventeen-year-old girl, it concerns a family’s annual six-week holiday at their English seaside summer house. Along with the narrator’s parents are her well-drawn siblings, the beautiful sixteen-year-old Mattie, fully aware of her sexual allure; the horse-crazy Tamsin, and their younger brother, Alex, a nature detective, who’s particularly keen on bats. Just down the beach a little is another summer house, occupied by their dad’s much younger cousin, Hope, and her witty and attractive actor boyfriend of twelve years, Mal. These two met in drama school, and the big announcement to start the holiday is that they will marry at the end of the summer.

However, this season by the sea will be quite different from past ones for more reasons than the upcoming nuptials. Hope announces that her godmother’s teenage sons, Kit and Hugo, will also be joining them. Within three days of the news, Florence Godden, the boys� movie-star mother, pulls up in a chauffeured black Mercedes to drop them off. She’s off to shoot a Hungarian art-house film, and she’s requested that Hope take charge of the young men. The contrast between the brothers couldn’t be more remarkable: the godlike Kit, the elder of the two, appears to emit light; the dark, sullen Hugo, on the other hand, seems to absorb it.

Kit can (and does) charm the pants off anyone—literally. His first and easiest conquest is, of course, the stunning Mattie, whose every romantic fantasy seems to be fulfilled by him. The narrator is more leery. An aspiring artist and observer, she rightly assesses him as a player and initially resists his attentions, but even gut feelings and warnings from Hugo, with whom she forms a friendship, aren’t enough to arm her against Kit’s sociopathic charisma. One reads compulsively to discover just how wide his path of destruction will be. Very wide, it turns out.

I’ve known Meg Rosoff’s name for years, but this is the first of her novels I’ve read. While it is not sexually graphic, the novel’s content and themes make it more suitable for mature young adults. I don’t think I’ve ever encountered a novel, certainly not a young adult one, that explores sociopathy so well.

Thank you to Candlewick for providing me with an advance review copy of this book.