School Spirits

Author: Rachel Hawkins
Goodreads Rating: 4.21
Pages: 298
Format: ARC from the Publisher

Fifteen-year-old Izzy Brannick was trained to fight monsters. For centuries, her family has hunted magical creatures. But when Izzy’s older sister vanishes without a trace while on a job, Izzy's mom decides they need to take a break.
Izzy and her mom move to a new town, but they soon discover it’s not as normal as it appears. A series of hauntings has been plaguing the local high school, and Izzy is determined to prove her worth and investigate. But assuming the guise of an average teenager is easier said than done. For a tough girl who's always been on her own, it’s strange to suddenly make friends and maybe even have a crush.
Can Izzy trust her new friends to help find the secret behind the hauntings before more people get hurt? 
Rachel Hawkins' delightful spin-off brings the same wit and charm as theNew York Times best-selling Hex Hall series. Get ready for more magic, mystery and romance!

This was a fabulous read. I was surprised to have gotten it in the mail, but I was super thrilled when it showed up on my door step. I have never read the Hex Hall series, but this still looked really interesting to me and like something I may want to try out. I've always been a big fan of supernatural books, and this was really hit it on the head.

For starters, I loved that it stuck with the covers like the original book series "Hex Hall" Nothing aggravates me more than when book series changes around the covers. But I digress. I suppose the biggest reason that this book scored a little lower than it would have was that I felt the entire book was written in cliche's. One of the things that stuck with me when I took a creative writing class was how you need to avoid cliche's, once in a while its okay, but every other paragraph had some kind of cliche. It was really irritating.

I really loved the characters that we were introduced to including Romy, Anderson and Dex. I sort of wish that Izzy had opened up to them earlier and talk to them about what was happening in the school. I really liked Izzy although she seemed to have no idea what was happening in the world around her outside of the magic.

I wish that her mother had stopped being so cagey about everything. What she was doing about Finn being missing, her different activities, all of it she was so cagey about and I feel that when its just you and one of your daughters, you can't afford to keep things from each other. Especially when one of them has already gone missing. I think the same also goes from Izzy to her mother even though she was a lot more up front about some of her problems.

I liked the whole ghosty problem that they had, it was a typical haunting but its own in a few ways. Then again, doing a ghost story isn't terribly hard, but making it special and creepy is important. I liked that this book wasn't so much with the creepy as it was with just being thrilling. I was on the edge of my seat wanting to know what was going to happen next. It was a terrifically fast read, and clearly there is more to come which I can't wait for. In the mean time, maybe I'll hit up the Hex Hall Series. (But probably not because as it stands, I have 200 unread books without adding new ones.)

The Courts Decision: