EricaO

This is one I should have read.
It's not that the reader is abyssmal but he's definitely not the best choice for this story. His pacing is too precise, as is his enunciation; he would be better suited to read books for a younger audience...and maybe books that don't feature any females because the way he voiced all the women in this ghost tale made me think he thinks females are generally stupid creatures and that rubbed me the wrong way.

So I think I'd have liked this more had it been done in my head instead of by this audio production company but I made a mistake and a book loses a star.

Here's what I liked:
-There was no cheaping out on the gore and it wasn't gore for the sake of being gruesomely shocking, at least, not for the most part. I liked that there was no sparing the details for the sake of gentle readers.
-Anna. For a ghost, she's pretty well-developed.
-Thomas and ... Carmel? Is her name Carmel? I liked that they were the standard background characters beefed up, given some pizzaz, and neither of them had to take the traditional role opposite Cas. Nice!

Here's what I didn't like:
-The reader. I mentioned that already.
-The cover. It was very misleading; it looks like the cover of a book of ghost stories for 10-year-olds. Only the hem of Anna's super pretty dress (it was rather plain in the book, right?) has blood on it and look at her hair swishing cartoonily in the wind. This cover uses sweetness to soften the blow of scary and that is not what happens in this story. I probably would have passed this over, thinking it was a softscare had I not seen so many high marks from friends.
-Thesius Cassio and his mother. I didn't like either of them. I suspect I didn't like Cass because of the reader but I didn't like the mom because she didn't come across as the kind of woman Cas seems to think she is. It's like she was playing around at being a white witch and a mom and a homemaker and she's really just a dithery and distracted ditz. That could also have been the reader; he made her sound stoned and dim. But it may have been the character, too. I'm not sure.
-The ending. I pretty much knew where everything was going but once we were in the last chapter, I was confused as to how everything suddenly all got where it was and why and where'd you come from...no, sorry, can you explain it again? I'm still not getting it. WHY are you here and HOW are doing the actual BEING HERE thing? And then it was the epilogue and I was left highly dissatisfied and wondering what the hell just happened. Then I remembered this is going to be a series because it is illegal to write a book that is not part of a series. You get sent to the firing squad if you even try a one-off and a team of hacks writes two more books with your name on it to follow your supposed stand-alone. That is how serious this is.

I think it didn't help that I'd just read School Spirits not too long ago and the two stories are not all that different, though this one is more fun in its spookiness and is mostly better-written. Still, that story may have stolen a bit of impact from this one just because of proximity.

Whatever the case, I've learned one thing: I'll be sure to NOT listen to the next one.