Bibliography:  McGill, Nichole. (2009).  Girl #3.  Toronto: Key Porter Books.  ISBN: 978-1554701438

Plot Summary:  Canadian high school sophomore Syd (short for Sidonia) loves running track and her bike and her newspaper route.  She loves the trees in the ravine.  And anything that irritates her mother.  She has to wear an ugly dress as a bridesmaid in her cousin’s wedding, she is growing apart from her best friend Alicia because they like the same boy, she is both hoping that her dad comes to the wedding and hoping he won’t.  Oh, and she keeps seeing dead girls everywhere.  Well, two specific dead girls who were abducted, killed and found in the ravines.  And then the man in the white car gives her a warning, and Syd has to figure out what to do.

Critical Analysis:

There is a sort of frenetic quality to the style and tone of this book, perhaps because of Sid’s voice.  Everything is seen from her perspective, and she both is and isn’t a typical teen.  Taking the parts of this book, one might think it sounded a little odd.  But this book is more than the sum of it’s parts, and Sid’s voice is a big part of that, compelling the reader to keep turning the pages.  Through her the author manages to create a sense of her world and the events that happen there, and how seeing the dead girls is  normal and strange.  The suspense comes from the same place, and builds as the events of the story unfold, even reaching moments of pure terror.  There is real power in the way that Sid handles everything and yet is still very much a teen, questioning what happened, whether she was a target, whether she is seeing ghosts or on the verge of losing her mind.