The Betrayal of Bindy Mackenzie

Lies dieses Review auf Deutsch

Title: The betrayal of Bindy Mackenzie (AUS)
Alternative: Becoming Bindy Mackenzie (UK), The murder of Bindy Mackenzie (USA)
Author: Jaclyn Moriarty
Publisher: Pan Macmillan Publishers Australia Pty Limited
Price: 9.99 $
Source? bought
Pages: 494


The betrayal of Bindy Mackenzie follows Bindy, the cleverest student at Ashbury High and, if you ask her, the nicest one aswell. The school introduces a new mandatory course called Friendship and Development (FAD), which obviously Bindy is not okay with since the students only talk about themselves and there's no new subject matter to be learned. In this course she finds out that everybody at her school dislikes her, so she seeks revenge, but it only results in more dislike (which is hardly possible), worse grades in school and a strange illness. So she decides to climb the problem-mountain from another side which is becoming a better person and changing her character to become liked. Finnegan Blonde, her FAD partner is the first one to discover her new character and presents a possible lov, also the other FAD-classmates get along better with Bindy (and her beloved grades get better aswell). But then Bindy's illness gets worse until she even faints in a school office. Her family finds out that she suffers from an arsenic poisoning and the book takes a sudden twist...


Personal Opinion:
It's been a while since I read this book, but I remember really enjoying it, I had read it on one weekend which doesn't happen that often to me. The Betrayal of Bindy Mackenzie was written in a very thrilling way, not as one continuous prosa text but as a collection of diary entries, leaflets and other documents that would have existed if this were a true story. I had to guess a bit every now and then that couldn't be told because of that, but considering all, it was written coherent.
The con of this way of writing is of course, that a few details or strands of plot had to go in there that weren't neccessary to the whole story.
Mrs. Moriarty did good work with this book, especially with the sudden change of plot: first it's all about the dislike against Bindy and then the arsen poisoning moves into the center of plot, but there have been a few subtile clues that introduced that, but you'd only realize that after you read far enough.


I recommend The Betrayal of Bindy Mackenzie to younger girls, up to the age of thirteen or fourteen, obviously, also "older" people can read it, but they might not enjoy it quite as much since they might put the stress more on love which is more in the backround here.


by Cecile