The Reading Shelf

I love reading books, especially Young Adult books of all kinds. I have a book reviewing blog (The Reading Shelf) that I try to update whenever I'm not reading or procrastinating on the internet.

School Spirits by Rachel Hawkins

School Spirits - Rachel Hawkins

This’ll be a pretty short review because it’s for a pretty short and fluffy book.

This is a companion book (series?) to the Hex Hall trilogy. I really enjoyed the Hex Hall trilogy, even during its slightly-over-the-top moments. This book centers on the cousin of the main character from Hex Hall, and I think that relationship works well for the book as well. This is the younger “cousin” of the Hex Hall books. It does seem slightly younger and less funny, but overall a nice and easy read.

 

Main character Izzy isn’t nearly as snark-happy as Sophie, which is a bit of a disappointment. However, her love interest makes up for her slight blandness. Dexter is very interesting and flamboyent and entertaining. Izzy is definitely the more angsty and subdued of the duo. And the romantic tension is a bit silly, but you’re still kind of rooting for these crazy kids. And I do think they are kids, or Izzy is anyway – she’s 15 and apparently a sophomore, but when she talks about the “bathing suit zone” in relation to the seriously lacking sex talk her mother apparently gave her a few years ago, she seems much younger.

 

I don’t know if it’s just the copy I got, but there seemed to be quite a few mistakes. Most of them seemed to be stylistic, though. There were some typos, but a lot of the formatting things that irritated me seemed like they might be deliberent. The author seems to enjoy squashing two people’s dialogue into one paragraph by adding a sentence or two in between them to somehow connect them. This just leaves me often confused as to who is talking, so it was a bit irritating. There were also a lot of ellipses. I’ve never been the type of person to care about ellipses in books, and I probably use them too much in my own writing (especially in texts – I seem to prefer ending my texts with ellipses rather than periods and I’m really not sure why), but for some reason it kind of bugged me in this book. I think that further lended to the younger feeling of the book.

 

Despite some of the minor issues I had with this book, though, it was pretty fun. The ending was a bit crazy but overall it was a nice book to pass the time with. It only took me about a day to read this (started it right before bed one night, finished a bit before bed the next night), and it was just quick and fluffy fun. The ending seemed to suggest that there’ll be more books in the series, but I didn’t see anything on Goodreads, so who knows at this point. If there are more books I’ll probably check them out, but I’m not hearbroken if this is it either.