Ghost Wood Song by Erica Waters Published by HarperTeen (7.14.2020)
Genres: Mystery, Urban Fantasy, Young Adult
Format: Audiobook, 368 pages
Length: 12 hours, 26 minutes
Narrator: Jesse Vilinsky
Source: Library
Sawkill Girls meets Beautiful Creatures in this lush and eerie debut, where the boundary between reality and nightmares is as thin as the veil between the living and the dead.
If I could have a fiddle made of Daddy’s bones, I’d play it. I’d learn all the secrets he kept.
Shady Grove inherited her father’s ability to call ghosts from the grave with his fiddle, but she also knows the fiddle’s tunes bring nothing but trouble and darkness.
But when her brother is accused of murder, she can’t let the dead keep their secrets.
In order to clear his name, she’s going to have to make those ghosts sing.
Family secrets, a gorgeously resonant LGBTQ love triangle, and just the right amount of creepiness make this young adult debut a haunting and hopeful story about facing everything that haunts us in the dark.
My thoughts
This book was one of those that I enjoy while reading and then never think about it again. Mostly I just enjoyed the murder mystery aspect and the setting. The vibe of this book was by far my favorite part! I loved the bayou/backwoods southern gothic atmosphere of this book. The fiddle that brought ghosts back was awesome, too! I wish there had been a lot more of that, because those parts are where this book really shines. Sadly, the cool stuff took a backseat to the romance. Which was absolutely terrible.
I despised the romance. Which is incredibly unfortunate, because it took over the plot entirely. It ruined the book for me, to be honest. I knew this book was LGBT, but I didn’t know it had a love triangle. Which is a trope that almost never works for me (and one that I really hate, it’s my least favorite trope in existence), and it especially didn’t work in this one because it was awful. Shady kept bouncing back and forth between Sarah and Cedar and it seriously pissed me off. One minute she was all “Sarah is perfect for me, I need to be with her!” and the next minute she was saying the same fucking thing about Cedar. In fact, she bounced right back to Cedar within a chapter of saying Sarah was the only one she wanted and that they were meant for each other *eye roll*
There was also no internal conflict or debate to result in the decision of who she ultimately chose in the end. View Spoiler » It was really odd.
Because of the focus on the romance, the middle of the book dragged and I got bored. (It did pick up in the last third, thankfully.) I also didn’t care one tiny bit about the characters. They lacked any depth or emotion, which kept me from connecting to the story.
If I had been physically reading this book, I probably would have DNFed it. The narrator was fantastic and she saved it for me.
Overall Assessment
Plot: 3.5/5
Premise: 4.5/5
Writing style: 3/5
Originality: 4/5
Characters: 2/5
World-building: 4/5
Pace: 3/5
Feels: 1/5
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