Mania

They thought dares were just games. They were wrong. Five girls. Five masks. One truth none of them can outrun. Maya hides her panic behind gum snaps and equations, pretending that if she can solve enough problems, she can solve herself. Every breath is a dare, every classroom a test she can't prepare for. Talia lives louder than anyone, thriving on chaos and reckless stunts. But her dares are armor - a brittle grin covering the fear that silence will swallow her whole.
Jordyn sketches everyone around her, bleeding the truth onto paper. Her drawings reveal what no one says out loud, but once they're seen, she can't take them back. Lexi performs for an audience that never sleeps, curating every smile, every caption, every "like." Behind the screen, though, she's cracking - desperate for love she can't edit or filter. And Noelle, quietest of all, writes the things the others try to bury.
Her spiral notebooks are filled with whispers too heavy to speak, until the words leak out and force her to be heard. They never planned to collide. But high school is a pressure cooker, and secrets don't stay hidden forever. A showcase wall. A public breakdown. A livestream gone too far. One by one, the cracks widen. Dares become dangerous. Whispers turn into confessions. And the fragile masks they've built start to shatter under the weight of truth.
Mania is more than a story about girls in a small town. It's a portrait of survival when the world demands you be stronger, prettier, quieter, louder, perfect. It's about panic that feels endless, laughter that's too sharp, silence that feels suffocating - and the terrifying, beautiful choice to stay. Raw, unsettling, and deeply human, Mania asks: What happens when the games stop being harmless? When the dares cut deeper than you can laugh off? When the whispers you bury find their way out anyway?For readers of Courtney Summers, Karen M.
McManus, and Kathleen Glasgow, Mania is a haunting YA contemporary novel about friendship as anchor, fear as shadow, and the breath it takes to whisper the most defiant words of all:Still here.