Suzy Cox
Release Date: 09/18/12
Synopsis from goodreads.com:
When Charlotte comes to after being pushed onto the subway tracks, she is informed by a group of teenage girls that she is dead…they all are. Meet the Dead Girls Detective Agency. With the support of these dynamic girls—including fashionable Lorna, who can’t wait to find out if the devil actually wears Prada, and nerdy Nancy, who insists on staying in limbo to help out other girls—Charlotte follows leads and tracks down clues to solve her own murder. With plenty of juicy mysteries and some pretty cute guys, readers are sure to fall in love with this fun and suspenseful page-turner!
Fans of Meg Cabot, Sara Shepard, and Ally Carter will delight in this exciting new paperback original.
My thoughts on the book:
The Dead Girls Detective Agency is supposed to be cute, funny, and lighthearted, but it just wasn't for me. I felt like this book was intended for more of a pre-teen audience than young adult. Because of that, it was hard to stay focused on this book. It didn't hold my interest very well, and the characters were a bit immature and flat for my liking. People who like books for the younger teen audience should enjoy it, though!
The narrator, Charlotte, was extremely annoying. She was a stereotypical bratty teenager, and I really couldn't connect with her at all. She was also a weak, boy-crazy girl. She cared more about what her ex was up to than who killed her. Like I said, seriously immature. I can't stand when heroines are obsessed with boys. It's so obnoxious. Furthermore, the supporting characters were flat and stereotypes as well. I really hate stereotypes, and this book was full of them. Even the dialogue was stereotypical "airhead" teenager. It got on my nerves fast and made it hard for me to concentrate. A younger audience may not notice things like that, but I did.
Another thing that disappointed me was the fact that this book wasn't as humorous as I had hoped it would be. The supposed humor felt forced, and it just flat out wasn't funny. The writing was sub-par at best. Cox needs to learn the proper usage of punctuation and not put 5 billion exclamation points after every sentence. It was seriously ridiculous and made me want to throw my Kindle out the window.
The mysteries also weren't that mysterious to me. I don't know if everyone could figure everything out as easily as I did, but there was no mystery about this book to me. The plot dragged for me in places, too. Additionally, the synopsis is a bit misleading... This book read nothing like a Meg Cabot book. I'm a huge fan of her Abandon series. Cabot's books actually have some stuff going on under the surface. This was just all fluff.
Overall, I'd recommend this book as a light read to people 13 and under. They would enjoy it much more than I did, I'm sure.
Sorry to hear you didn't like this one more. The premise was very intriguing, though I have the same nits as you--shallow and stereotypical characters don't hold much interest for me. But I bet you're right that a younger audience would enjoy it.
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