The 1988 book, Gimme a Kiss, deals with everyone’s worst nightmare.

Jane Retton’s diary has been stolen, photocopied, and passed around all of the students at her high school!  Everyone at the school is reading about how Jane lost her virginity to her committed boyfriend and how she totally loves him.  Everyone at the school declares that this makes Jane a total whore, even though the diary makes it clear that Jane has only had sex with her boyfriend and she only did that after she was sure that she was in love with him.

Here’s the thing, though.  The diary is a lie!  Jane is still a virgin and the only thing that she wrote in her diary was her fantasy about what she would like to do with her boyfriend!  And now, just because Jane has upset the school’s snooty cheerleaders, everyone thinks that she’s sexually active….

Wow, this book is really a product of the 1980s.

Anyway, Jane decides that the best way to handle all of this would be to fake her death so she decides to pretend to fall off of a boat and …. wait, what?  I’m not really sure that I see Jane’s logic here.  It didn’t make much sense when I read the book and, looking back on it, it still doesn’t make much sense.  Still, Jane decides to fake her death so that everyone will reconsider the way they treated her while she was alive.  (Because, certainly, it’s not like everyone’s going to be even more pissed off at her if they discover they were put through a peroid of mourning for nothing….)  But then someone starts coming after Jane and her classmates for real…. Could Jane’s true enemy be someone close to her?

This book was only 122-pages long.  It was a quick read, which is always a good thing.  The plot didn’t make a bit of sense and it felt like something that Christopher Pike just tossed on the page to make a deadline.  As opposed to other Christopher Pike books, the characters come across as being rather flat.  I will applaud the book for embracing the melodrama, especially in the scene where Jane learns the real reason why she’s being targeted.  But otherwise, this is lesser Pike.