Review : Give up the Ghost

Posted by kay on September 7, 2010 6:00 am in 3.5 stars reads | 4 comments

Give up the Ghost by Megan Crewe
Pages : 241
Genre : YA, Paranormal
Stand Alone
My Rating :

From the back of the book :

Cass McKenna much prefers ghosts over “breathers”. Ghosts are uncomplicated and dependable, and they know the dirt on everybody… and Cass loves dirt. She’s on a mission to expose the dirty secrets of the poseurs in her school.
But when the vice president of the student council discovers her secret, Cass’s whole scheme hangs in the balance. Tim wants her to help him contact his recently deceased mother, and Cass reluctantly agrees.
As Cass becomes increasingly entwined in Tim’s life, she’s surprised to realize he’s not so bad — and he needs help more desperately than anyone else suspects. Maybe it’s time to give the living another chance…

Give up the Ghost was the perfect way to spend an afternoon : the story is straight to the point, the characters are a bit stereotyped but with enough personality, and parts of the story alternate between entertaining and heartbreaking. Megan Crewe did a great job of taking the usual clique system of high-school and adding to it a paranormal twist.

I liked Cass, and the fact that the story begins with her already at ease with her particular talent. Seeing ghost is part of the routine for her. It might remind you of the show Ghost Whisperer, but Cass isn’t trying to help the ghosts cross over to a better place : she’s more concerned in using their secrets to take her revenge on the other students. I thought this would make me dislike her, but it wasn’t the case. Even though I didn’t approve of her decisions, I understood why she was taking them.

I think the most surprising aspect of the book for me was the lack of romance. Cass does develop a strong relationship with Tim, but it’s more friendship than anything else. The story is more focussed on the two characters’s individual stories than on the possibility of what they could develop together. It was such a nice change not to have the teen romance thrown into the mix! I admire Crewe for not taking the easy route of the “dork girl and popular hot guy fall in love” storyline.

While Give up the Ghost wasn’t the most memorable story, it was definitely a character-centric book I enjoyed. If you take the ghosts out of the book, it was just “regular” people in a “regular” setting. It made it easy to relate to Cass and Tim and to enjoy Crewe’s writing. For a fun afternoon of ghostly activity, you might want to give this book a chance!