Abandoned by Booklikes

Yeah I know. Sometimes you just read books one after another that tickle your funny bone cause they are really not good. I mean, I get what Cusick was trying here, but after I got to the end and all is revealed I was like, dang? Really? This is a more brutal horror book for Cusick I thought. Ryan (she's a teen girl) and her sister Marisa are walking in the woods collecting pine cones for Christmas decorations (as one does) and Marisa falls through some ice and drowns. Ryan tries to save her, but is haunted by not being able to pull Marisa out. Just three weeks after her sister's death, Ryan starts to feel like Marisa is still there watching and blaming her for not saving her.

I think this is the first Cusick book I can recall off the top of my head that someone we are introduced to in the first few pages dies. I wish I could feel sorry for Ryan. But she had some terrible logic when it came to figuring out what is going on. She also tells everyone her plans and just generally has everyone thinking she's losing her mind.

Ryan is a teen girl that once again has two boys falling for her. Heck one of them even tells her that he only went out with her sister to get closer to her. Um thanks dude, you also kind of suck.

Ryan's best friend Phoebe and Phoebe's brother Jinx (yeah I am not looking up if I spelled that right) are seriously her only two friends besides the owner of the toy store she works out.

Due to Ryan's mother being a freaking moron, some random dude named Charles shows up saying he was dating Marisa and wants to be close to her family since she died. Since Ryan's mother went to the "I am a terrible mother and have no common sense" school she allows the dude to move in with them, and makes Ryan move out of her room into her dead sister's room so Charles can stay in her room. I am serious.

Honestly this whole book reads like a bad farce. You keep having random people thrown at you and you wonder how everything ties together. It really doesn't when the final reveal comes. My face probably looked like this:

Maybe this just means I should stop reading books from my youth, because most of these did not hold up well at all.