Dead and Buried (review)

2/5 stars

Needless to say The Dead and Buried (Goodreads | Amazon) did not work for me.  I love a good crime-solving teen as much (if not more) than the next person but this book drove me crazy.  There is nothing good to distinguish this from the other crime solving stories.  Nothing about the ghost story is new or special.  This book just lacks....lacks.

When Jade moves to a big new house in a big new town she's excited to start over.  This is what she's always wanted, even if senior year is a little late to make that change.  But she's excited anyways until she finds her great new house used to belong to the most popular girl in school until she was murdered.  The ghost of Kayla, your typical bitchy mean-girl, threatens to possess Jade's little brother unless Jade can find out what the police never did--who killed her.

This book loses itself in it's teenageness. Yes it's a YA, but there's a difference between being authentically teenage and trying to be teenage.  Now that Jade's at a new school she's suddenly getting male attention despite never having a boyfriend before (why does that sound familiar?). Yes there's a love triangle, one that falls flat at every attempt to drum up the drama.

Overall a lot of things just felt unnatural and forced, from the cliche use of a mirror to describe the main character, to the over-description of a love interests eyes, to Jade wanting to "fix" a badboy, even the word usage felt unnatural.

For me the only part of this book that worked were Kayla's diary entries.  They added the only real drama to the book.  I like that the diary used numbers to describe people rather than names so the reader had to put the pieces together.

This book just threw together too many of the YA cliches without adding anything special (and collecting gemstones is not special enough). The Dead and Buried couldn't make me care about the characters or the story.