Shannon

tl;dr adele doesn't watch the crime shows with her grandpa and it shows, the author seems to have gone on without sensitivity readers or a group of teen early readers and it REALLY shows

3.25 - i'm not quite sure i like any of these characters and i've definitely been in some high school crap in my life :/

edit, shortly after writing the first review: after determining that 3.25 was far too generous, this gets a .5, MAYBE a single star - that's Really Not How Mental Illness works, generally speaking if someone goes off their meds for whatever reason the brakes on the brain train stop working and things go off the rails; one of the very first things to go (at least for me) is the inability to distinguish between reality and hallucination or fantasy. i definitely don't feel clearheaded for very long, if at all, and i'm just...incredibly disappointed because the dual plot points of ghost-talker and ghost-who-can't-remember-the-death is interesting enough to build a really good story on.

the characters in general were either unlikable to begin with or flipped back and forth between being somewhat okay and downright terrible to read about and adele herself was...really not a great portrait of someone who's trying to pass as a grieving friend while trying to solve a murder. charlie was just about the best character in the book, and we don't even get to know him terribly well! somehow we're supposed to believe that he just sciences the hell out of things and figures out that adele is telling the truth when he barely even knows her? and then they somehow fall in love at the very end? really? none of the high schoolers are believable as teens even though yeah, okay, teens have parties and get drunk and terrible things sometimes happen, but we're also supposed to believe that every single teen swaps sides so quickly?

i'd sooner reread dodger boy, which i gave something like 2 stars for its bland characters, tokenism, and disjointed and boring narrative, than probably pick up another book by this author...kind of a shame, really, since the writing style itself wasn't terrible; my main issues are with the characters themselves and the portrayal of perceived mental illness

this is super minor and maybe i'm missing something or i don't understand how spy pens work, but.........if charlie had the USB portion of adele's spy pen, how was it still able to record a voice at an indeterminate (i'm assuming large) range?? where was charlie while adele was off gallivanting at the park, the police station, and the cemetery? portland isn't some tiny city and we never find out the distance between the apartment complex and the police station or even where the school is