Ghosty Teen Books

The Secret Life of Sparrow DelaneyI’ve been on a ghost teen novel kick lately — they’re perfect fall reading, even though I ended up with more novels on the funny side than on the strictly spooky side. The Secret Life of Sparrow Delaney by Suzanne Harper is the most current one I read and it was so incredibly satisfying. Sparrow is the seventh daughter of a seventh daughter in a family chock full of mediums. Everyone predicts she’s going to be an amazing psychic but she spends the first fifteen years of her life pretending that there isn’t anything unusual about her at all. And of course the real truth of the matter is that she is a super psychic and doesn’t just get faint impressions or anything like that. She sees, hears, smells ghosts and can sit and have a chat with them, but she keeps it all on the down low. She even tries going to a school where no one knows her or her family of professional mediums so that she pretend to be normal. Of course it doesn’t work and that is what makes the book so fun.

I also read the Mediator series by Meg Cabot which is a little bit older — I think the most recent one came out a couple of years ago. This series is irresistible. I don’t know if it’s the character’s voice, her tendency to kick ghost bootie, or the fabulous Carmel, CA setting, but it’s a super entertaining read that you just don’t want to end. Suze can see and talk to ghosts and feels it’s her mission to help them move on to the other side. Until she meets Jesse the hot dead guy from the 19th century who inhabits her new bedroom. Does he really need to move on?

Also on my list was Beating Heart by A.M. Jenkins which is a the scariest of the ghost books I read. I was so in love with Repossessed that I had to go back and see what else A.M. Jenkins had written and I discovered Beating Heart. Evan moves into an old mansion with his mom and his sister and starts having these erotic dreams about a girl he’s never met. When the contractors renovating the house find a box of old photos and documents in a papered over wall safe, he discovers a photo of THE GIRL. Very creepy. His chapters are interspersed with chapters from the ghost’s point of view all done in poetry. It’s a great medium for her voice — very wispy and ethereal. Evan’s relationship with his real life girlfriend parallels the ghosts illicit relationship from when she was alive with the troubled boy who lived with her family. This adds a whole layer of drama as you start to figure out how she died and what that might mean for Evan. V. exciting.