Monday 2 October 2017

Ruined by Paula Morris

A year after Hurricane Katrina, Rebecca Brown is sent from her home in New York City to live among strangers in New Orleans. Among the tombs of Lafayette Cemetery, one of the famous Cities of the Dead, Rebecca makes her only friend – a ghost named Lisette, who has a very old score to settle. – Authors website.

Unexpectedly sent to New Orleans for six months while her father travels for work, Rebecca has no friends, no family, and no idea what she is doing. The girls at her new school are snooty and distant, the family friend she is staying with is peculiar and reads tarot cards to tourists for a living, and she has been banned from talking to the only boy she finds even remotely interesting. So what else is a bored teenager to do but to explore the cemetery across the road and befriend a ghost?

Rebecca promises Lisette that she will help her however she can, not realizing that although Lisette died hundreds of years before Rebecca was born, the two are connected in unexpected ways.

I have to say that while this may not be one of the best YA novels I have read, it definitely had me hooked. Set in New Orleans (a city I have always wanted to visit) you would never guess that the author was a kiwi. This book for me was more about the setting, and the amazing descriptions of not only the various parts of the city, but the wonderful, colourful people that Rebecca meets along the way. Morris used such descriptive language to describe places, and included many restaurants and cafés in her story that truly exist (and that I can’t wait to visit for myself).

While this story was a supernatural thriller, with a teen love story, to me it was more like a love letter to a city.

Posted by Sas

Catalogue link: Ruined
 

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