Dare Me

Addy Hanlon has always been Beth Cassidy's best friend and trusted lieutenant. Beth calls the shots and Addy carries them out, a long-established order of things that has brought them to the pinnacle of their high-school careers. Now they're seniors who rule the intensely competitive cheer squad, feared and followed by the other girls -- until the young new coach arrives.

Cool and commanding, an emissary from the adult world just beyond their reach, Coach Colette French draws Addy and the other cheerleaders into her life. Only Beth, unsettled by the new regime, remains outside Coach's golden circle, waging a subtle but vicious campaign to regain her position as "top girl" -- both with the team and with Addy herself. 

Then a suicide focuses a police investigation on Coach and her squad. After the first wave of shock and grief, Addy tries to uncover the truth behind the death -- and learns that the boundary between loyalty and love can be dangerous terrain. 

The raw passions of girlhood are brought to life in this taut, unflinching exploration of friendship, ambition, and power. Award-winning novelist Megan Abbott, writing with what Tom Perrotta has hailed as “total authority and an almost desperate intensity,” provides a harrowing glimpse into the dark heart of the all-American girl.

News

The USA TV adaptation of Dare Me is now a Netflix Top 10. Heralded as one of the best TV shows of 2020 by the Atlantic, Time, Vulture, and many others.

Praise

“Megan Abbott has [written]...The Great American Cheerleading Novel, and—stop scowling—it’s spectacular.... Subversive stuff... ‘Heathers’ meets ‘Fight Club’ good. Abbott pulls it all off with a fresh, nervy voice, and a plot brimming with the jealousy and betrayal you'd expect from a bunch of teenage girls.”
— Chelsea Cain, New York Times Book Review

 “What’s exciting about Dare Me is how it makes that traditionally masculine genre [noir] feel distinctly female. It feels groundbreaking when Abbott takes noir conventions — loss of innocence, paranoia, the manipulative sexuality of newly independent women — and suggests that they're rooted in high school, deep in the hearts of all-American girls.”
— Entertainment Weekly

“This terrific novel, Abbott takes a plot that seems torn from the headlines and transforms it into Shakespearean tragedy... This is cheerleading as blood sport, BRING IT ON meets FIGHT CLUB — just try putting it down.”
— Booklist (Starred Review)

“In Dare Me Megan Abbott guides us into the subculture of athletic and fierce young cheerleaders, who train together, compete, and bond until they form a rugged unit much as Marines form a rugged unit…Abbott has become expert at revealing truths we thought we knew but didn’t, delivered in prose that is by turns elegant and incantatory.”
— Daniel Woodrell, author of Winter’s Bone