Title: Me, the Missing, and the Dead
Author: Jenny Valentine
Category: Fiction, Young Adult
Rating: 4/5
Summary: 16-year-old Lucas finds an old lady in an urn, who just so happens to have some connection to his missing dad. If he can find out who the dead lady was, can he find his dad?

Review: From the brief description of this on Amazon, I wasn’t interested. It sounded like a ghost story, and I don’t do ghost stories. Or scary movies, for that matter. I’ve been known to sleep with the light on after a particularly creepy episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, for Pete’s sake.

But this book was a finalist for the Morris YA Debut Award this year, so ghost or not, I decided to give it a go.

What an odd little story. I loved it.

It made me laugh, but it also made my heart ache as Lucas comes to grips with his dad’s disappearance. Here’s a taste for you:

If we ever find my dad and he’s dead, I’m going to organize the biggest funeral you’ve ever seen…We’ll play the best music, and everyone he ever knew and liked will be there and cry their eyes out and say really nice things about him. Afterwards, back at our house, we’ll have the best wake and nobody will want to leave. They’ll look after Mum and make sure she’s OK. They’ll phone her every week instead of being too embarrassed to say anything or ever call because there isn’t a body and they’re a bit busy with work and they were his friends really, not hers.

On the funny end of the spectrum, there’s this scene where Lucas interrogates his little brother like a cop, which cracks me up to think of it even now, a good 2 weeks after I finished the book.

Borrow: Your local library | Swap
Buy: Your local bookstore | Powell’s | Amazon

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