Sunday, September 11, 2011

Nancy Holder's Possessions


Possessions

This is the final one I forgot about, again I am truly sorry. 
Possessions by Nancy Holder
Book 1 of the Possessions series
Razorbill –September 3, 2009
Facebook: Yes
Rating: Absolutely loved it!!
Recommendations: YA fans, ghost stories, boarding school stories.
Lindsay has started Marlwood in the middle of the first semester. On her first day she manages to witness a strange ritual that she’s pretty sure she wasn’t supposed to see, irritate Dr. Ehrlenbach by not dressing appropriately. But she soon learns that this is the least of her problems. She wanted to come to Marlwood to leave the tragic events of her life and the vivid memory of her breakdown in the past, for a chance to reinvent herself. But she finds that hard to do when she is pulled into the popular crowd as a way to keep an eye on her roommate, who may be the only friend she has at school. Mandy, the leader of the popular crowd, insists on doing pranks as a way to initiate girls into the exclusive group. But the pranks become dangerous and the in-crowd becomes weirder. In her attempt to protect Julie, her roommate, she uncovers some secrets that will only convince people that she’s the one who’s crazy and manages to create a rift in her friendship. Lindsay isn’t sure she’s not the one going crazy when she starts to see a mysterious ghostly face in the reflections of mirrors and shower stalls, and when she starts to smell and hear things from events that had to happen in the past. But things don’t calm down, they escalate to the death of one of the popular kids; the same one that was trying to talk to –warn- Lindsay. Troy, Mandy’s boyfriend-soon to be ex-comes up missing.  To top off all the weirdness of her first semester at Marlwood, the ghostly face that followed Lindsay around campus has now followed her home.


This is a well-crafted ghost story that will have you jumping at all the things that go bump in the night, the strange images that your mind will create in the shadows around you. And the only thing you can do is let go and enjoy the scare. There are things that irritate me bout this book-but in the most positive way possible. The main thing is that you, as the reader, don’t know what’s going on. Nancy doesn’t give anything away, so at times I found myself getting freaked out. The entire story is told through the eyes of Lindsay, so there is nothing that you know that she doesn’t. In the back of my head I kept wondering what was really going on; either Mandy and the popular crowd were cruel and really going to great lengths just to scare people. Mandy seems to have the money to do just that, but there was nothing in the book that supported the idea that Mandy was behind the weirdness. In fact the more that I read, there wasn’t any real evidence that Mandy was even aware of the things that were going on that she didn’t directly control. Yes, she was participating in it, and she may have even initiated contact with the spirit world. But at some point, the spirits started taking over. Not knowing exactly what was going on, only made it that much easier for Holder to play on instinctual fears.
Though this part of the story ended in a way that absolutely irritates me , I have to admit that it absolutely works for this and it may have done more damage if a resolution was  forced into it. So my advice if you can’t stand for books to just stop, then get all three books together and read them straight through. ( I am not sure if there are only three or if there will be more. This is the first one and I didn’t get them altogether.) But the ending was a resting point for both Lindsay and the reader (at least it was for me). It’s the rest that comes when you’ve been scared to death and you need to take the time to relax and catch your breath, slow your heart down before it jumps out of your chest. Your mind is left with questions swirling around in your head and you find yourself wondering if you really just read what you did. The same feeling that Lindsay is left with as the story ends in this book. If I had been told that this book had a very open-ended conclusion before I started reading, I would have passed on reading it. ( I need closure in real life as well as in the fictional world.) But I would have missed out on something that has become my favorite read of the summer so far. I can only imagine what it would have been like to read this during Halloween.
Always Shine,
Starr K. 

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