Mundie Moms

Saturday, January 26, 2013

Book Review: The Dead and Buried by Kim Harringto


By: Kim Harrington
Published by: Point / Scholastic
Released on: January 1st, 2013
Source: arc from publisher for review/blog tour
3 stars: It's A Good Read
Purchase from: Amazon | Barnes & Noble


A haunted house, a buried mystery, and a very angry ghost make this one unforgettable thriller.

Jade loves the house she's just moved into with her family. She doesn't even mind being the new girl at the high school: It's a fresh start, and there's that one guy with the dreamy blue eyes. . . . But then things begin happening. Strange, otherworldly things. Jade's little brother claims to see a glimmering girl in his room. Jade's jewelry gets moved around, as if by an invisible hand. Kids at school whisper behind her back like they know something she doesn't.


Soon, Jade must face an impossible fact: that her perfect house is haunted. Haunted by a ghost who's seeking not just vengeance, but the truth. The ghost of a girl who ruled Jade's school — until her untimely death last year. It's up to Jade to put the pieces together before her own life is at stake. As Jade investigates the mystery, she discovers that her new friends in town have more than a few deep, dark secrets. But is one of them a murderer? -quoted from Goodreads


There's something about ghosts, a murder mystery, and a touch of romance that intrigue me. Books with ghost stories are the kind of books I want to sit and read and at the same time I don't even want to touch, because then I start getting all jumpy while reading them. Despite my being a wuss when it's comes to reading a good haunting, I still find myself getting sucked into the story. Sometimes jumping at all the sounds my house makes late at night is part of the experience in reading a good ghost story. Though The Dead and Buried wasn't as thrilling of a haunting as I was excepting/hoped it to be, it was a good one nonetheless. 

It's Jade's senior year of high school, and that means starting a new school. Not that it would be very fun to do so, but for Jade this change meant getting out of the small town she has lived most all of her life. Her new start means a bigger school, a nicer home, and new friends. What Jade is about to discover is that her home harbors more than bigger space, and a newer looking home. Something sinister is there, and it's up to Jade to stop it. The thing with Jade is I understood her wanting to move. I loved her protectiveness of her little brother. I felt bad that her step mom was such a you know what toward her, well at least I felt she was. Maybe that's because I'm a mom, and I would have taken the time to actually listen to what my step daughter was saying (if I had one), and not jump to conclusion and accuse her of making up stories like Jade's did. If you can't tell I was was a little ticked over the way her step mom treated her when she tried to tell her about what was really going on in their house, her mom all but basically told her to stop making up stories. 

Jade makes some interesting new friends, and I like that each of them had a reason for being in the story. The interesting thing with this story, was that while it's told from Jade's point of view, we also get journal entries, which help paint the picture of the kind of person the ghost is. The ghost being a girl who was a senior the year before Jade moved into the house named Faye, was killed in a so called freak accident in her home, which now the home Jade calls home. The friends Jade makes were some of her friends, and the guy she crushes on was Faye's boyfriend. The more the story unravels, the more I got to see the kind of person this girl was. In seeing the kind of person she was lead to the "who dun it" part of her murder mystery. That was unfortunately something that didn't take me long to figure out.

 I like how the haunting was tied into solving who really killed Faye. I thought Kim did a good job at making Jade an unwilling participant in Faye's quest for the truth. With Faye threatening Jade's family and her little brother, Jade had no choice but to help her. I admired her for wanting to protect them, even if she was scared to death over what Faye could do. Even though I liked how the haunting and Jade's new life intertwined, I felt it fell a little short for me. There was something missing from the execution of the storyline for me to really get into it and to really feel that chilling vibe you get when you read a thrilling ghost story. Don't get me wrong, it was a good haunting, just not the one I was excepting. I think this is a story other YA readers will like. It's one I'd even recommend to younger YA readers as well. 

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