She Smells the Dead by E. J. Stevens + Giveaway

Publication Date: September 9, 2010

Summary from Goodreads:

It's the beginning of senior year and Yuki's psychic awareness of ghostly spirits is threatening to ruin her life. Her ability to sense spirits of the dead isn't glamorous like on TV. SHE SMELLS THE DEAD. Yuki is being visited in her dreams and suspects that her friend Calvin is involved in something strange. Will Yuki be able to save the spirits and herself?

My Two Cents:

To be honest I was a little skeptical about this one. The title is a little weird for me because I've never heard of anyone "smelling" the dead. Though I like the way the girl on the cover looks so I figured I'd give it a try. Yuki doesn't actually smell the rotting corpse of someone, but she smells something symbolic to them. The only way to stop the smell from driving her nuts is to follow her nose pretty much and try to figure out what the spirit is trying to tell her.

Straight from the beginning we are pulled into a mystery about a guy that Yuki has "smelled". She's trying to find out if he died naturally or was actually killed. I thought this was pretty much the story. Boy was I wrong. It felt like I was reading 3 stories inside of one. We start off on the mystery of Mr. Green (the dead guy) then when we're finally getting somewhere with that we switch over to Calvin and Yuki's relationship which appears out of thin air, then the mystery of Calvin and somehow the whole middle of the book is not about Yuki but about Calvin. That was pretty strange...as was the dialect in this book. The most overused phrases were "yah" and "son of a dung beetle". I think if this was told from alternate point of views between Yuki and Calvin it might have went over better. Also there were way too many clues that made it extremely obvious what was going on with Yuki's best friend Calvin. I would've liked it if we were made to just use our brains and figure it out or even let it be a surprise. The ending was just a complete cliffhanger. It was not dark like I was expecting from the summary and the cover but pretty light.

Rating:

I've seen a lot of good reviews on this but it just wasn't for me but perhaps this sounds like something you might be into? If so please enter my giveaway for a signed copy of this.

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