Liz Loves Books.Com.

Publication Date: 27th May from Amazon Childrens Publishing Skyscape.

Thank you to the author and publisher for the review copy via netgalley.

The isolated town of Beldon, Wisconsin, is shocked when a high school freshman’s body is found in Lake Algonquin. Just like everyone in the community, sixteen-year-old Daniel Byers believes that Emily Jackson’s death was accidental. But at her funeral, when he has a terrifying vision of her, his world begins to rip apart at the seams.

Right, so, good news bad news with this particular Young Adult novel for me. As always I’ll start with the good – the premise is intriguing, the main character easy to follow along with and its a pretty good mystery story. Very easy reading with a lovely flowing prose and the opening was immediately engrossing.

On the bad news side I felt it lacked focus and depth on the actual story, after that terrific opening and probably for the first third of the book. It kind of meanders along. There is some action and intrigue and building of the mythology, but there was also, for me, WAY too much about the football and the possible love interests. A good deal of time is taken up with “which girl will Daniel invite to the homecoming dance and hey, isnt he a great and popular football player”. I wanted to know why he was seeing dead people…and it took a while for any of that side of the story to take off.

Back to the good news – once it did take off it was pretty darn good. There are plenty of twists and turns and I was pretty gripped by the whole thing, the story wrapped up well and it was overall a satisfying reading experience.

I think this will hit the mark exactly with its target audience, no doubt about that. For Adult readers though, if you are a fan of YA fiction, you may find this a bit on the bland side. I think thats probably my main issue with it.

I’m not sure how this will be a trilogy – perhaps that is the reason for the “filler” feeling at the start of the story. Having said all that I liked it enough to definitely add the next book in the series to my reading list, I am quite intrigued about where this will go next. We’ll see.

Happy Reading Folks!