The Ghost and the Goth »

After a close encounter with the front end of a school bus, Alona Dare goes from Homecoming Queen to Queen of the Dead. Now she’s stuck as a spirit in the land of the living with no sign of the big, bright light to take her away. To make matters worse, the only person who might be able to help her is Will Killian, a total loser outcast. He alone can see and hear (turns out he’s been “blessed” with the ability to communicate with the dead), but he wants nothing to do with the former mean girl of Groundsboro High.

Alona has never needed anyone for anything, and now she’s supposed to expose her deepest, darkest secrets to this pseudo-goth boy? Right. She’s not telling anyone what really happened the day she died, not even to save her eternal soul. And Will’s not filling out any volunteer forms to help her cross to the other side. He only has a few more weeks until his graduation, when he can strike out on his own and find a place with less spiritual interference. But he has to survive and stay out of the psych ward until then. Can they get over their mutual distrust—and the weird attraction between them—to work together before Alona vanishes for good and Will is locked up for seeing things that don’t exist?

Publishers Weekly

The sneering heroine of Kade's debut novel, the aptly named Alona, rules her high school's social scene with an iron fist. Alona has secrets, but before readers can discover them, she gets killed ("God, buses are so ugly when you see them that close up"). While Alona is learning to cope with the fact that a ghost can't be the center of attention (and that her friends aren't as genuine as she believed them to be), her narration alternates with that of one of her former classmates, Will, a social outcast fighting a diagnosis of mental illness. Will, in fact, can see and speak with the dead, who overwhelm him with their demands to take care of last requests. Alona is part of the clamoring crowd at first, and by the time she learns to work with Will, it might be too late for him to avoid the mental hospital and make it to graduation. Bumpy initially, the story becomes steadily more engrossing as Kade finds her feet stylistically and her characters' voices and identities develop. Ages 12-up. (July)