A new website pops up asking you not what you want, but what you need. What lengths will you go to in order to obtain what you most desire?

A new social networking site takes Kaylee Dunham’s high school by storm, and even she can’t resist the question, “What do you need?”

For most of the students, their needs range from a longer vacation to concert tickets, but Kaylee’s needs are much more dire: She needs a kidney for her brother, or he’ll die.

The site starts off simple and innocent enough, but soon thoughtless pranks turn into deadly requirements. How far will these students go to get what they think they need out of life? The answer to that question is more frightening than anyone wants to admit.

‘Need’ book review:

Joelle Charbonneau takes a relevant and realistic approach in this modern thriller. Who isn’t on social media these days? Facebook. Twitter. Snapchat. We might use them innocently, but there are plenty of people out there who hide behind the anonymity to become darker and more twisted versions of themselves.

NEED, the website this story focuses on, presents the perfect platform for high school students to do just that. They think they need trivial objects, but as the site points out more than once, there is a difference between want and need. This book explores that concept to a deadly end.

Kaylee is the type of heroine a book like this must have. She is not without faults, desires, and baggage, but she’s also smart, noble, and good. While her classmates will do anything to get ahead, Kaylee questions the system. While they accept the tasks presented to them, Kaylee does everything in her power to stop this dangerous social experiment from taking more lives.

What is often unrealistic in stories like this has no bearing in Need. Kaylee goes to the police early on instead of unrealistically keeping information to herself and trying to solve it on her own. Plenty of obstacles stand in the way of shutting down NEED, but these are elements out of her control. Kaylee does not get out unscathed, and neither do the other students.

While Charbonneau’s The Testing trilogy took on a world not too far removed from ours where the line is blurred between right and wrong, Need takes on our world — the one we live in right now. Social media is both friend and foe, a tool and a hindrance. It is as helpful as it is dangerous.

The real question is whether we continue to recognize its power, or if we’ll be drawn in just as deeply as the students of Nottawa High School and forget what anonymity allows us to get away with.

Need by Joelle Charbonneau is available now. You can add it to your Goodreads list or purchase it on Amazon or IndieBound.