Saturday, September 12, 2009

Holy label dropping Batman!


I love ghost stories so when this book was offered on Amazon Vine's newsletter I decided to snatch it up. It sounded really interesting.

Kendall moves from the big city of Chicago to a small town in Georgia. She's not excited about it. When she moves into the house Kendall starts to hear voices and she also starts to feel other people's pain. Kendall has psychic powers and she forms her own ghost hunting group.

The story sounds great, and maybe it was. However, the story is lost because of the nonstop label dropping. I think this is a vain attempt to make the story more real or current, but it only served to distract me. For instance instead of the MC going to get chips she has to get "Cheetos" and worry about her "Weight Watcher" points. The reader is slapped with some type of label dropping on every page.

I was unable to get into the story because I was busy counting how many times the author used a product name. Within the first 15 pages of the book there are 17 product names. Finally by page 27 I ditched the book. I think that might be a record, but I couldn't force myself to read it.

Has anyone else read this novel? Did they enjoy it?

2 comments:

Donna (Bites) said...

Ick. Don't you hate that! I haven't read this one but I've come across other books like it and it just gets annoying. And, usually, it has a tendency of dating the material. In a few years, will teens know the relevance of Weight Watchers points?

YA Librarian said...

I agree. If you want a book to be timeless I dont think one should be putting in so many modern references such as googling, Oprah, Dasani, Blue Cult jeans(which btw I dunno what they are) and so on.