Ghost Girl by Tonya Hurley

Charlotte Usher has always been the invisible one at school. Never pretty enough, popular enough, athletic enough or rich enough to stand out. But when she comes back to school for her junior year, she vows that this year will be *her* year. The year she finally makes the school cheerleading squad, the year she finally joins the clique of popular girls, the year she finally makes Damen Dylan, the school quarterback and Head Cheerleader Petula Kensington's boyfriend take notice of her. Maybe even ask her out.

Or not. When her efforts to dress like the most popular girls in school are pooh-poohed by Petula and her sycophantic followers, the Wendys, and someone erases her name for the cheerleading tryouts and puts in their own, Charlotte is unbowed. After all, her first class is with Damen, and she might actually get a chance to talk to him!

Her chance comes when the teacher reveals that Damen isn't doing well in school, and if he fails physics, he will be kicked off the team. Charlotte offers to tutor him, and he agrees, noticing her for the first time. Heart floating somewhere in the clouds, Charlotte tries to talk to Damen after class, but chokes on a gummy bear and dies in the hallway.

But death is not the end for Charlotte, and she neither goes winging off to the clouds nor falls into a fiery pit of torment. Instead, she is enrolled in Ghost School, where she must learn to use her powers to help her fellow ghosts rather than terrify or help humans, and meets the ghosts of the children and a teacher that go to school there. Pam, known as Picolo Pam for how she died... tripping on a step and ramming her own piccolo down her throat, shows Charlotte around and introduces her to the others, like Metal Mike, who died for the sake of his beloved Metal Music, and her teacher, Mr. Brain, who was partially decapitated so that his Brain shows through.

But even here, there are winners and losers, and the girl in charge is Prue. She seems to take an instant dislike to Charlotte, and goes out of her way to make life hard for her. But when Charlotte realizes no one can see her in her ghostly state, she decides to make the most of it and become a dead "Stalker", following Damen around everywhere... and I do mean *everywhere*.

But a chance encounter with Petula's Goth Girl sister, Scarlet, reveals that not only can Scarlet see her, but with her willing assistance, Charlotte can exchange bodies with Scarlet and use Scarlet's body to romance Damen. However, Petula isn't going to take this lying down, and when Damen starts falling for Charlotte in Scarlet's body, Scarlet starts falling for him back... because Charlotte can't be in her all the time.

Soon, though, the ghosts find themselves in a crisis. The dorm that they inhabit is going to be torn down if they can't come up with a way to save it. And, though no one talks about it, Charlotte is the one, the special ghost who could redeem them all... if she isn't too busy chasing Damen to care. And when Charlotte gets it into her head that her Romance with Damen is what will save the other ghosts and allow them all to graduate from Ghost School, is she right? Or will her attempts to mess with the human world damn them all?

This book is intended as a YA book, but comes across as very un-teen, with sly asides on how ridiculous the whole teen obsession over fashion, dates, athletes and cheerleading is, and how shallow the popular but mean girls are. Add to that a subtle dig at teens themselves (none of the ghosts miss their families or have even thought about them because they are all too self-absorbed, or so their Ghost teacher tells them), and you get a book that feels more like an adult pointing out the foibles of teens to other adults rather than a usual YA-type novel. While it's not always apparent that this is the case, it is a strong thread running through the novel.

The protagonist is a sympathetic character... who can't relate to feeling left out by the other kids in High School? And who can't relate to feeling invisible to most of their classmates? (Well, I had a slightly different experience in that most knew me, but only as the butt of their jokes and teasing. Not a great position to be in, either.) But no matter what she does, Charlotte can't seem to cut a break. Even after she dies, she seems to remain on the bottom of the totem pole with her new class of fellow ghosts. She can't seem to absorb that the only way to move on is to stop thinking about only yourself and your own concerns and to think of what other people want or need.

Charlotte does get it eventually, but getting there is a long process, and she becomes both the savior and bane of her classmates, both dead and alive. The ending of the book is rather puzzling, though. Is graduation movement to some higher plane, as the second-to-last chapter seems to imply? Or do "graduated" ghosts remain ghosts, only becoming helpful ones? Or is Charlotte some kind of, again, special case? We aren't given enough information to tell, and left me feeling rather curious at this question that was implied but never answered.

And Charlotte isn't the only character to grow over the course of the book. Most of the human characters do as well, and some of the ghost characters. But even this is inconsistent. We are told, over and over again, that "graduating" for ghost teens means being able to give up what mattered to you, and the baggage that caused your death, or that you carried around because of their deaths. But if that is so, how can Charlotte save anyone besides herself? How will her passing save the others? That point isn't well explained, because for most of the book, the secret is kept even from Charlotte herself.

While I enjoyed the book a great deal, it is not without story flaws and inconsistencies. Since this is a stand-alone book, it's also unlikely that these will ever be explained. But for a (what seems to be) first novel, it isn't bad at all. Some teens might be annoyed with the author for how she paints teens, as neurotic and self-absorbed, but more will agree with the truths she reveals and enjoy the story of a loser girl who eventually makes good. Adults will also enjoy the story, but probably see more of the flaws in it while it makes them remember their own teenage years.