The 1986 novel, Weekend, involves the most memorable senior ditch day ever!

9 friends, who have a tangled web of personal relationships and conflicting feelings towards each other, head down to Mexico for the weekend.  They’ve got a mansion to stay in, one that belongs to the absent parents of their friend Robin.  Robin once had a great singing voice and a great future but, at the last party that her friends threw, someone spiked her drink with insecticide.  Now, Robin can barely speak and is only being kept alive by a dialysis machine.  The weekend in Mexico starts out as a fun but soon, secrets are being revealed, live are being put at risk, and who knows who will survive to the end!

The majority of the story is told through the eyes of Shani, who is a well-written and complicated character.  As opposed to the characters who populate the majority of R.L. Stine’s Fear Street books, Shani is nether perfect nor totally evil.  Instead, she’s someone who has very real emotions and, even more importantly, very real reactions to everything that’s going on around her.  (Christopher Pike’s novels have always felt a little less generic than R.L. Stine’s.  That said, Pike’s novels also have a tendency to be a bit more unnecessarily complicated than Stine’s.)   That said, the other characters are not as well-written as Shani and, with a total of 9 people staying at that mansion, it can get a bit difficult to keep straight of who is who.  Keep a notebook nearby so you can jot down who betrayed who at which pep rally because it’s not always easy to keep track of it all.

I always enjoy books about people stranded with a killer for the weekend and Weekend does a good job of keeping you guessing as to who is responsible for what.  The finale, in which everything is explained, is enjoyably over the top.  Pike, wisely, chooses to embrace the melodrama when it comes to wrapping everything up.

Weekend is an enjoyably over-the-top novel.  If nothing else, this book might make you appreciate your own occasionally overdramatic friends.  Because as dramatic as they may be, they’re nowhere near as bad as the folks in Weekend.