Children Shouldn’t Play with Dead Things (Dead Things #1)
Summary:
17 year old Ember Denning has made an art of isolating herself. She prefers the dead. She spends her days skipping school in old cemeteries and her nights hiding from her alcoholic father at the funeral home where she works. When her own father dies, Ember learns her whole life is a lie. Standing in the cemetery that’s been her sanctuary, she’s threatened by the most beautiful boy she’s ever seen and rescued by two people who claim to be her family. They say she’s special, that she has a supernatural gift like them…they just don’t know exactly what it is.
They take her to a small Florida town, where Ember’s life takes a turn for the weird. She’s living with her reaper cousins, an orphaned werewolf pack, a faery and a human genius. Ember’s powers are growing stronger, morphing into something bigger than anything anybody anticipated. Ember has questions but nobody has answers. Nobody knows what she is. They only know her mysterious magical gift is trying to kill them and that beautiful dangerous boy from the cemetery may be the only thing standing between her and death.
As Ember’s talents are revealed so are the secrets her father hid and those in power who would seek to destroy her. What’s worse, saving Ember has put her cousins in danger and turned her friend’s lives upside down. Ember must learn to embrace her magic or risk losing the family she’s pieced together. (Summary and cover courtesy of goodreads.com)
Review:
I loved, loved, this premise of reapers and how they work. It was also a very fun interpretation of the other powers, but I won’t go into all the details as some of those are spoilers. There is something that is very refreshing about the style of world-building and particularly all the politics that come with the powers. I will say the title was one of the main draws to the book and it had less to do with the story that I exactly expected.
One unfortunate aspect of the book is that it had an abrupt ending. While I love a good series as much as the next person, I also prefer it when the stories individually have their own completion. This, like many young adult books these days, felt like the story was chopped at a convenient point by the publisher to keep it to a specific length.
Warning: Contains some violence.
Rating: 4 stars!
Who should read it? People looking for some creepy crawly fun paranormal stuff.
Want to read the whole series?
Loving You with Teeth and Claws (Dead Things #0.5)
Dark Dreams and Dead Things (Dead Things #2)
Deranged Angels and Cannibal Hearts (Dead Things #3)
Sinister Souls and Dead Things (Dead Things #4)