A review by leakelley
Give Up the Ghost by Megan Crewe

4.0

Cass McKenna sees dead people. Her older sister, Paige, drowned four years ago, and Cass has been able to see ghosts ever since. This is a skill that she puts to pointed use at her high school, where two ghost friends provide with her all the gossip she needs to punish the kids who turned their backs on her in middle school. No one knows how Cass does it, but they all stay away from her regardless, and she likes it better that way. Things start changing when Cass finally gets the information she needs to punish her former best friend Danielle, who led the turn against her years before. This also brings her to the attention of Tim, who desperately wants to communicate with his recently deceased mother, and he forces Cass back into the land of the living.

The best thing about this book is definitely the character of Cass, who tries to do the right thing even while sometimes causing more pain than the mean girls who tortured her. She has cut herself off from everyone except her dead friends and her dead sister, and her parents are too lost in their own grief to help her. Three years of knowing every dirty detail about the students and teachers around her has only driven her further away from any human contact. Since this book is set late in high school, and contain drinking and references to sex, it's more appropriate for older kids than for my 7th graders, but I think it would also be good for a student who is feeling isolated from the world or dealing with grief.