Title: ghostgirl
Author: Tonya Hurley
Category: Fiction, Young Adult
Summary: Charlotte Usher feels invisible at school. Then one day, she becomes invisible—or rather, dead. Unfortunately for her, dying doesn’t mean she’s done with high school.

Stopped on Page: 85
Why I Stopped: I found myself skimming just to get the plot points, so I figured I should call it a day with this one. I didn’t really care about the main character, and the style of writing was getting on my nerves a little. I’m having trouble pinpointing exactly why that is, although I have a couple ideas. No better way to learn how to write than to study what you do and don’t like, so here goes…

Here’s an example from when Charlotte is trying to sign up for cheerleader tryouts. Adverbs are in bold.

As she started writing the “C,” she was tapped harshly on the shoulder. Charlotte stopped writing and turned to see who was interrupting her first task of the day—no, of her new life—and then saw a line of girls who had been “camped out” all night waiting to sign up. The gathering resembled less of a tryout than a casting call.

The obnoxious candidate looked her over from head to toe, grabbed the pen, and simultaneously wrote her name in and Charlotte off. She then opened her hand and let the pen mercilessly drop the length of the string.

Charlotte watched the pen sway against the wall like a hanged man.

None of those adverbs are necessary. And since I’m trying to learn how to tighten up my own writing, they screamed at me to notice their total lack of value. (Also, why the quotation marks around “camped out”? Does that mean they didn’t actually camp out? Is this a euphemism for something?)

I think it was also the metaphors and similes throughout that got to me. From the above excerpt, we have: a casting call, a hanged man. The first doesn’t really add anything to the description that we don’t already get from knowing that they camped out. The second seems a bit much, and I don’t actually get it. Why is the pen the doomed one? It seems odd to describe the pen in such detail when we should be hearing about how Charlotte’s feeling. Maybe it was little things like this that made it hard for me to connect to her as a character.

Then here’s an example from later, when the characters are picking science lab partners:

The classmates turned toward each other, pointing to friends across the room, some were screaming and jumping up and down as if they’d “made it through to Hollywood” on American Idol.

Really? This reaction for picking lab partners? (And again with the quotation marks! Ack!)

Should I have kept going? Or was I right to stop?

Note: As an aspiring author, I respect the extraordinary amount of effort that goes into writing a book. I did not write this review in order to be unfair or negative about the book. My goal is simply to articulate why the book wasn’t for me.

Related Posts