When fourteen-year-old Leigh's father buys a graveyard and insists she work there after school, she learns much about life, death, and the power of friendship.
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I'm just such a sucker for a book with a spooky pun title.
This book... every chapter I was just barely interested enough to keep reading instead of DNFing it. I think it just had a little too much going on? Here's how much stuff it has going on:
- Leigh's older sister is in remission from cancer
- In the meantime, her dad impulse bought a graveyard and makes Leigh work in it afterschool because he can't handle selling graves to people
- Leigh seems to have some sort of eating disorder that's not really addressed, but she explicitly says she only eats toast and York Peppermint patties because that's what her sister could eat when she was going through chemo?? so like every chapter she talks about needing to buy more Yorks and all the other characters tell her how skinny she is but nothing really comes of it
- Leigh's mentor is the undocumented Mexican worker her dad hired to dig graves and they have this whole coyote plotline going on
- Leigh is bullied at school for being poor, although she isn't exactly poor, she just refuses to spend money to buy new clothes?
- Leigh has some other unresolved grief in a way that she's both extremely aware of but also extremely unaware of?
- Leigh's mom seems to... have something going on, in that she spends 80% of her time visiting friends in Menocino, where the family used to live? Basically her parents seem CRAZY neglectful, and I get that they went through some stuff when her sister had cancer and they're not bouncing back from it, but as depicted it really seems to have reached the level where someone from the school should be intervening??
and yet with ALL THAT GOING ON there are still chapters where like nothing happens??
idk man, idk
Will probably still appeal to tweens/younger teens who like sad books/books about unjust parents. Content-wise, it's pretty clean (of sex/drugs etc).
