ARC Review: The Dead and Buried

The Dead and Buried by Kim Harrington

Published by Scholastics Point

Release date: Jan. 1, 2013

Genre: YA paranormal/mystery

$17.99 (US hardback)

304 pages

 

 

What it's about:



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?

 

My thoughts:
I have read Kim Harrington's, Clarity series a few times. I thought that she had done a marvelous job with keeping the suspense and creepiness going through the whole story. When I saw The Dead and Buried on Netgalley, I couldn't wait to read it. Unfortunately the book was a miss for me. It just didn't live up to my expectations.

I never really felt any connection to the characters in the book. Jade moves to this new house in the city and then she starts her new school. Immediately she is accepted and falls for the outcast, Donovan and the school hottie falls for Jade. All the sudden she is dating both boys and is in with the dead girls crowd. Jade was very accepting of everyone and everyone to her and I just couldn't believe that. Not within a matter of a day or two.

Another miss with me was the writing. it was all in lower case, with a few random Capitals thrown in. WTF? It drove me crazy. I very much need my i's to be correct, I want the names to be capitalized as well. It goes against everything I've had drilled into my head since I was six and it just seems wrong. Unfortunately this seems to be a trend in writing techniques because I've been seeing a lot more of it lately. Maybe this was also part of the reason for my disconnect with the book.

In Clarity, the killer wasn't obvious. Harrington had kept the reader guessing, but in Dead and Buried, I thought it was obvious almost from the very beginning. There wasn't any guessing on my part and all the big moments in the book didn't seem like big moments. There wasn't any "Ah HA!" moments for me. I kept waiting for them and it just never happened.

My rating: 6/10