Cruel Sacrifice

The words of a murderer: "This should not have happened. This is not me. It's so stupid when you think about it. It shouldn't have caused a death. I don't blame me. We just need a little growing up. We were young, and we still are." Aphrodite Jones takes the reader into the world of several teenage girls in small-town southern Indiana--their clothes, rock music, and fascination with offbeat spirituality, and also their lesbian jealousies and penchant for violence. This book provides a useful balance to an earlier account by Michael Quinlan (Little Lost Angel). Jones's style is less dramatic than Quinlan's, but she devotes more space to the family backgrounds and psychological complexities of the two girls whose hot-vs-cold temperaments meshed to bring about the murder of 12-year-old Shanda Sharer.