IHeartYAFiction

Review:Short and Sweet:Absent is a short, cute read. I'm glad I didn't miss it!To Elaborate....Paige has died and now she is stuck in high school forever. What's worse, everyone is saying that it wasn't an accident, that she killed herself. For the first time since she died, Paige has something to fight for. She will not be remembered as 'the girl who jumped.' Then, Paige discovers by accident that she can possess her classmates whenever she hears a whisper of her name in their thoughts. At first she hopes to use their voices to quell the rumors, but when that doesn't work she decides to go after the source of the rumor itself: the popular Kelsey Pope. But Paige's motives are becoming less about clearing her name and more about revenge and she's keeping her possessions a secret from Evan and Brooke, the school's other 2 ghosts. I think this book speaks a lot about labels and what people will or won't do to fit into social groups. At the end of the book most of the characters are better off for what they have learned, and I think there are some good messages here. So, why only 3.5 stars? This book was super simple, but hinted throughout the story that perhaps the school was cursed. It kind of psyched me out about what was going on. I thought it was going somewhere completely different with a few characters, but apparently I misread some unimportant elements as foreshadowing. So for me it was good, but not GREAT! Also, my one real problem with this book is that we don't find out what happens to a character named Harriet. She was a major character for a bit, faded out, came back and then disappeared without mention. Maybe this will be resolved in the final version.