Ghostly Visions

17 & Gone by Nova Ren Suma

17 & Gone features Lauren, a 17 year old girl who becomes obsessed with other 17 year old girls who have gone missing.  The ghosts of these girls begin to haunt Lauren, telling her details about their lives and urging her to help them. 

I picked up 17 & Gone based on a few reviews I had read here and there around the Internet which said how great this book was.  I have mixed feelings about it.  For the first 2/3 of the book, all I got from it was a "meh" kind of feeling.  The idea was interesting, but it didn't have the suspense or spook factor that I had been expecting.  Then all of a sudden, right around the 2/3 mark BAM.  All the careful fact laying and plot building that had felt dull before finally made sense.  I wish I could say more, other than this book will play with your expectations.  My mixed feelings come from the fact that the first half of the book was a bit blah for me, despite the payoff at the end. 


Recommended for: someone looking for a haunting read; fans of first person narration that is very much inside the head of the narrator (so much so that at one point I felt vaguely claustrophobic)