TL;DR teenagers misusing the afterlife
TBR #867, added May 11 2014
finished 7/24/16
I am apparently extremely in the minority about this book, at least on Goodreads. It took me until page 3 of the reviews to find one I agreed with. I did not enjoy this, and honestly I should've just DNFed it.
This is going to be a really bitter review. I apologize in advance.
The premise itself was interesting enough, but the execution was anything but. Starting with the setting of the Mall of America. If all these kids in the story are from NYC, why are you sending them to Minnesota? And why are there only four kids throughout most of the story? I find it really hard to believe that only two kids from the city died and ended up there over the course of the book's time period. New York is huge. You can't tell me only two kids were murdered in the (weeks? months? who knows!) since Sarah was murdered.
(I also don't think the Mall of America was used to its full extent. Sure, I haven't been there since middle school, but I never experienced any kind of nostalgia for it. The setting wasn't built up enough to feel anything more than "okay, they're at a large mall. We get it.")
And oh man, I hated Sarah's narration from the beginning. It didn't feel authentic at all and felt like it was trying too hard to be ~cool~ and ~teenager-like~, more like MG narration by someone who doesn't actually know how kids sound in real life. It was choppy at times and honestly, Sarah was not a sympathetic 1st person narrator.
None of the characters were sympathetic, really. They never felt like real people. They were too one-dimensional for most of the book, and then when they did actually change, it didn't feel earned. I couldn't tell you what specifically had led to their character changes. (I mean, this could be because Sarah wasn't there at the time, but I think there could've been other ways to show it as well.)
Nick was interesting when he first showed up and was all flirty, but there was nothing supporting the romance Sarah had with him. He never did anything that really earned him this affection. He just kind of existed and got Sarah to fawn all over him. Their romance only influenced the plot negatively and got them into situations that a) could've been easily avoided and b) weren't helpful to advancing the storyline. Their one big fight also had little to no basis and felt forced in order to move the plot along, rather than make a point about their relationship.
The paranormal aspects also missed a lot of their potential. Sarah's "Knowing" was only used conveniently, despite how she saw it, and was more like a convenient plot point than anything useful or hurtful (like she swore it was up until the last, like, three chapters). The Boy was disappointing as a character and was honestly useless as an authority figure considering how much the kids disrespected their (and Bertha's) commands and got away with it. I also don't think The Boy and angels should've been used as concepts in the book when there's no other mention of any religion or religious ideas / figures. Ghosts to me are a very anti-religious concept and the mall-walkers and other broken-record-ghosts don't mesh with what I know about various religions' concepts of afterlives. (I guess you can make an argument for Purgatory, but it didn't feel much like that in the story.)
The ending was also super dissatisfying after all the book built it up to be. Sarah spends all this time trying to do something, and even gets the other kids on board with helping her with her narrative while rarely helping theirs, and then the solution they finally complete is lackluster and doesn't wrap anything up that well.
TL;DR I was consistently disappointed by how the book was executed and I'm upset that I made myself read the whole thing only to find a fall-flat ending and unsatisfying character growth.
This is also my first one-star review for this year. I'm surprised my good-book streak lasted this long.
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