Review: Notes from Ghost Town by Kate Ellison

Title: Notes from Ghost Town
Author: Kate Ellison
Hardcover: 336 pages
Publisher: EgmontUSA (February 12, 2013)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1606842641
ISBN-13: 978-1606842645
[From Amazon]
Source: NetGalley

They say first love never dies...

From critically acclaimed author Kate Ellison comes a heartbreaking mystery of mental illness, unspoken love, and murder. When sixteen-year-old artist Olivia Tithe is visited by the ghost of her first love, Lucas Stern, it’s only through scattered images and notes left behind that she can unravel the mystery of his death.

There’s a catch: Olivia has gone colorblind, and there’s a good chance she’s losing her mind completely—just like her mother did. How else to explain seeing (and falling in love all over again with) someone who isn’t really there?
With the murder trial looming just nine days away, Olivia must follow her heart to the truth, no matter how painful.

It’s the only way she can save herself. [From Goodreads]
Goodreads | Amazon

Review

Prologues are generally little sparkling glimmers into what the rest of the book holds.  Notes from Ghost Town blinds you with something sad and beautiful.  Gripping in its raw emotionality, it instantly pulls you in to the story.  The striking difference between the scene Olivia is remembering and the mournful words she is writing is like pouring salt on a paper cut…it hurts.

And it continues to hurt.  The emotions bleed off the page and sink into the core of your being.  They manipulate you until you ache with Liv.  Until her pain is as real to you as it is to her.  But it’s all amazingly the voice of a teenager, dealing with things that teens should never have to face.  Trying to find her own way through the sorrow that has been dealt to her.  The scene at the beach with Stern resonates with a voice that is genuine.  And a genuine heartache and longing.

There’s something about Liv’s unyielding belief in her mother’s innocence, that against all odds she believes in her mother.  It’s the blind faith, that we as parents, want our children to have in us.  I wanted to hold Liv, to comfort her, tell her it was all going to be alright.  That we’d figure this out, find out the answers.  It bothered me that her dad wrote her off so easily, that he didn’t fight harder.  I appreciate that Ellison didn’t take this to a cheesy level, where Liv, Teen Detective, solves the case and proves her mother’s innocence without breaking a sweat, or a nail.  I like that, aside from the ghost of Stern helping Liv, it was a right-place-right-time-fit-the-pieces-together unraveling of the truth.

Ellison wrote with such realism.  And depth.  And raw emotion.  And you need to read this book.

4 Moons

Get to reading,