The Raising

January 10, 2011
Kasischke (In a Perfect World) delivers a satisfying if predictable campus novel that's both gothic romance and coming-of-age tale. A year after sorority girl Nicole Werner died in a car accident, Nicole's boyfriend, Craig Clements-Rabbitt, who was driving, is trying to put his life together. When snobbish sophisticate Craig had arrived from New Hampshire at Godwin Honors Hall—a selective college within a huge Midwestern university—he soon got on the nerves of his more down-to-earth roommate, Perry Edwards, and Perry's childhood schoolmate, the beautiful Nicole. Now, Craig is a sober soul, but Nicole's former sorority sisters are unwilling to let her "murderer" be. Meanwhile, Shelly Lockes, the first witness at the accident scene, is hounded out of town, and Mira Polson, a professor of anthropology who looks too closely at Nicole's death, is forced to resign. Students commit suicide or are "accidentally" shot dead. If the narrative is convoluted, so is the diabolical, if improbable, scheme hatched by the sisters of Omega Theta Tau. Big Sister, apparently, watches over us all.

December 15, 2010
Set in and around the campus of a fictional midwestern university, Kasischkes eighth novel centers on a tragic car accident that has taken the life of beautiful, straight-A student Nicole. A year later, her sorority sisters are still up in arms and lay the blame for Nicoles death on her boyfriend, Craig, who, they claim, is an irresponsible rich kid. But Craigs roommate, Philip, who grew up with Nicole, has begun to think that she is not really dead and approaches his sociology professor, who is teaching a class on death, for help. Meanwhile, a witness to the accident has given up trying to straighten out the many erroneous newspaper accounts stating that Nicole was found covered in blood, for the girl she saw was not bleeding and not dead. Kasischke excels at depicting the psychology of the young and the traumatized even as she delivers a scathing indictment of the siege mentality of college administrators. In this literary page-turner, reminiscent of Donna Tartts Secret History (1992), the talented author inlays her academic novel with a touch of the supernatural and a deep sense of foreboding.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2010, American Library Association.)