REVIEW The Ghost and The Goth by Stacey Kade

The Ghost and The Goth
by Stacey Kade
Hardcover/Paperback
Hyperion
June 29, 2010
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Alona Dare–Senior in high school, co-captain of the cheerleading squad, Homecoming Queen three years in a row, voted most likely to marry a movie star… and newly dead.


I’m the girl you hated in high school. Is it my fault I was born with it all-good looks, silky blond hair, a hot bod, and a keen sense of what everyone else should not be wearing? But my life isn’t perfect, especially since I died. Run over by a bus of band geeks—is there anything more humiliating? As it turns out, yes—watching your boyfriend and friends move on with life, only days after your funeral. And you wouldn’t believe what they’re saying about me now that they think I can’t hear them. To top it off, I’m starting to disappear, flickering in and out of existence. I don’t know where I go when I’m gone, but it’s not good. Where is that freaking white light already?

Will Killian–Senior in high school, outcast, dubbed “Will Kill” by the popular crowd for the unearthly aura around him, voted most likely to rob a bank…and a ghost-talker.

I can see, hear, and touch the dead. Unfortunately, they can also see, hear and touch me. Yeah, because surviving high school isn’t hard enough already. I’ve done my best to hide my “gift.” After all, my dad, who shared my ability, killed himself because of it when I was fifteen. But lately, pretending to be normal has gotten a lot harder. A new ghost—an anonymous, seething cloud of negative energy with the capacity to throw me around—is pursuing me with a vengeance. My mom, who knows nothing about what I can do, is worrying about the increase in odd incidents, my shrink is tossing around terms like “temporary confinement for psychiatric evaluation,” and my principal, who thinks I’m a disruption and a faker, is searching for every way possible to get rid of me. How many weeks until graduation?

 
 
I have been putting off reading this one FOREVER. I don’t know why. I shouldn’t have. I guess I built the story up in my head (I’m a huge sucker for cheerleader/loner-gothboy stories) that I was afraid that it would end up being…well…not what I was looking for.


I was wrong. This book is almost criminally adorable. It’s exactly what I was looking for.

Alona is the very definition of a Queen Bee. She’s pretty much the stereotypical mean girl (even though she doesn’t think she’s being mean at all), and so she’s taking the fact that she just got run over by a bus a little hard.

But when she realizes that Will can see her, everything changes.  Suddenly she has purpose.  She will get his help to be whereever the heck she's supposed to end up...you know...bright light at the end of the tunnel.

The only problem is, all the other ghosts realize that Will can see them at pretty much the same time...

Will has been trying to ignore the dead for his entire life, and it hasn't been going well, especially with the principal taking away his iPod--his one source of distraction--and his mother forcing him to see a shrink.  And now he has to deal with the Queen Bee herself.

I loved Alona and Will.  They're both adorable and they're so clearly into eachother, but they still have a push-shove kind of relationship, each trying to make the other back down.  It's good for both of them, and it's the cutest thing ever to watch.

Seriously...this book was EXACTLY what I wanted it to be.  I'm hoping the rest of the series is more of the same, because I LOVED it!

Great read! 

-geekgirl