I received this book for free from Publisher in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.
If I Have to Be Haunted by Miranda Sun Published by HarperTeen on 9/26/23
Genres: Contemporary, Fantasy & Magic, Paranormal, Romance, Young Adult
Pages: 368
Format: eARC
Source: Publisher
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Cara Tang doesn’t want to be haunted.
Look, the dead have issues, and Cara has enough of her own. Her overbearing mother insists she be the “perfect” Chinese American daughter—which means suppressing her ghost-speaking powers—and she keeps getting into fights with Zacharias Coleson, the local golden boy whose smirk makes her want to set things on fire.
Then she stumbles across Zach’s dead body in the woods. He’s even more infuriating as a ghost, but Cara’s the only one who can see him—and save him.
Agreeing to resurrect him puts her at odds with her mother, draws her into a dangerous liminal world of monsters and magic—and worse, leaves her stuck with Zach. Yet as she and Zach grow closer, forced to depend on each other to survive, Cara finds the most terrifying thing is that she might not hate him so much after all.
Maybe this is why her mother warned her about ghosts.
Short and Sweet Review
Cara is able to see ghost and its rough because on one hand her mom doesn’t want her to but her grandma is also a ghost that she can talk to and lives in their house and gives Cara advice. At school Cara has a rivalry with another student, Zach, and they’re paired up for a project. When Cara goes to meet with Zach she ends up finding his dead body instead. Now Cara is forced to embrace her ghost speaking abilities and try to help resurrect Zach. On their journey they encounter some crazy monsters and Cara starts to understand why her mom would try to keep her away from this world.
This book was different then I thought it would be and I’m not sure why I thought that because I did read the synopsis before going into it. Anyway I thought Cara would find Zach and it’d be like a mystery and they try to find what killed him. Instead we find his body and learn that Cara can help resurrect him and they go on almost a week long adventure through different thresholds, running into different monsters to try to save him. It was a welcome surprise for me because it wasn’t what I was expecting. Cara and Zach have a relationship where they get on each others nerves and they have a reputation for doing this and everyone around them knows it, so this journey they go on gives them lots of time to cozy up to each other. Like I mentioned earlier the fantasy element was more prevalent then I thought it would be, we see our main characters travel to the liminal world which is like another dimension but using places from the real world that the characters recognize. We see different monsters and even a cannibal who was unhinged and very creepy, we even meet a new character. I wasn’t sure how I would feel about this character tagging along but in the end I did like her involvement. I will say I’m not completely sure how I feel about this book, there’s things that I loved like seeing Cara embrace her powers for once and realize that the choice to be a ghost speaker is hers alone to make, and also the fantasy elements that were involved. When I didn’t like so much was how Cara and Zach conveniently overcame their years long issues with each other in a week but I guess things do change when someone is dead. I also didn’t like how quickly Cara and her moms problems were solved in the end. Lastly that last chapter didn’t feel necessary if anything that could have been the epilogue or it could have been omitted it was cringey and I didn’t like it. The epilogue did make it seem like this would have more books involved which could be interesting now that Cara is okay with being a ghost speaker and her mom is coming around.
Overall, this book had more good than bad for me but unfortunately I can’t get past the things I didn’t like. I will say this is a good book for the upcoming fall season and I did mostly enjoy it.
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