Saturday, October 8, 2011

Queen of the Dead by Stacey Kade - How Will It End?


Pros: Another enjoyable romp with Will and Alona
Cons: Not *quite* as much fun as the first book

The Bottom Line: With "Uh oh" moments and "How will this work out?" questions, it's a solid sequel for ghostly goodness.

The first book, The Ghost and the Goth was something I never thought I'd read. I just thought, "Psh. Cliché." And moved on. But for some reason it kept popping up, so I finally read the book blurb, and then curiosity got the best of me. I read it and thoroughly enjoyed it. And the best part? It wasn't really cliché at all!

So when I saw a second book appear on the shelves, I got excited. More of Will and Alona? Yay! If you haven't read the first book, you need to in order to know what is going on. There are no explanations at the beginning of this book (which is fine with me), so you'd be jumping in blind.

Will is busy doing his ghost-talking thing with Alona at his side when suddenly a pretty girl shows up and interrupts them. The girl, Mina, is a ghost-talker to - the first one Will has ever met aside from his dad. He's determined to learn more about her and the other ghost-talkers she seems to know, much to Alona's displeasure. And when Alona wants Will's help, he's a bit, well, unhelpful. So it's up to Alona to solve her own problems. However, that only leads to many more - and much bigger - problems.

It's Alona being herself and Will being, well, normal all over again, which is fun. The emergence of the ghost-talkers opened up a whole new set of possibilites for these stories, and with so much going on, I started to wonder, "Um, is there going to be a third book?" (One visit to the author's site and yes, there will be.) I kept wondering how the author, Stacey Kade, was going to put these two together permanently. If that was her plan anyway. It seems to have worked out well, but that brings out even more questions as to how the third book is going to work. Very interested in seeing how that goes down.

Though I am personally kind of bored with stupid/corrupt/secretive organizations that go around taking care of some of mankind's problems, I'm willing to see how this plays out. I'm also interested in learning the final bits of information regarding Will's father and just why he killed himself (not a spoiler, fyi).

I can see some people having problems following Kade's logic/rules for the afterworld, such as the necessary positive energy to stick around vs. ghosts that are in no way nice and can actually kill people. But she lets her characters address this and it's good enough for me. Besides, if everyone had all the answers to the afterworld, all of this would be pointless, wouldn't it?

Just like the last book, this one see-saws between Will's point of view and Alona's. Both are written in first person. You'll be left with more questions at the end of this book than you might like, but hey, that's what the next book is for!

NT

Originally posted on Epinions.com

Notes from the playlist: "The Lonely" by Christina Perri

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