Ghosty

This book is a fantastic step in the series, definitely a must-read and an eye opener, however the ending was another open ended ending and ugh I really hope the fourth book (because there HAS to be a fourth one now) doesn't take too long to come out because I just really want to know how this all ends

I can't remember the last book I hated this much. I don't know where to start.

The plot is sloppy, the dialogues are unbelievable, this is clearly just an attempt at teaching teens about STD's through fear tactics. Which could have been done better.

But the worst part is that this book was FILLED with teens shown thinking “but if I go to this party where I engage in oral activity, maybe my crush will fall in love with me and everything will be perfect”

How was this published?

“She had no idea how he would feel about her afterward. If she was good, he might come back for more. Then maybe they'd fall in love and make love. That'd be cool.”

SPOILERS AHEAD.

The party never happens because the few people who decide to go show up last minute, and the girl hosting (Gin) chose a night her parents wouldn't be home for a few hours because of some dumb reason I thought would fall through all along. I don't remember it and I'm not backtracking. This whole party relied on her parents being out of the house for “a few hours.” But they come home of course and the chapter ends as people start walking up to the front door.

THEN it skips ahead to weeks later where Gin is being ostracized at school because there was an outbreak of gonorrhea just after the party that never happened because everyone was already hooking up with everyone. And it's somehow Gin's fault because it's common knowledge that she's been with every guy. It might be, I don't care.

But I can't get over how sloppy the writing was. It was all extremely juvenile, even for a teen book. I cringed a lot.

Loved it. Here's everything I highlighted, mostly fob and panic related:

Where Are Your Boys Tonight? - Chris Payne (Highlight: 46)

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◆ Introduction

▪ In 2017, Brand New's Jesse Lacey was accused of sexual misconduct by multiple women, who described similar accounts of a twenty-something Lacey preying on them throughout the 2000s when they were as young as fifteen. Brand New subsequently canceled touring plans and Lacey issued an apology statement, though it did not address specifics of the of sexual misconduct accusations. In Where Are Your Boys Tonight?, I attempted to depict where and how Brand New drove the narrative of the 2000s emo boom, without glorifying Lacey himself. I realize that, at times, this bestriding may seem difficult, if not impossible: Brand New was arguably the most innovative and critically acclaimed band of their scene. Their appeal was so cultish and specific, it's hard to put into words. I truly hope I captured it in a way that feels accurate to the era, and brings no further pain to those Lacey hurt.

▪ While the emo boom is inextricable from the internet, it's tied to physical space and a time I don't think could ever exist again

▪ when the internet was accessible enough to spread word of new demos and DIY shows, but pre-MySpace platforms like message boards and LiveJournal were still too analog and isolated to make anyone famous.

◆ Part 1: Close to Home, 1999–2000

▪ PETE WENTZ: bassist, Fall Out Boy (and previously, bassist, Racetraitor; front person, Arma Angelus); founder, Decaydance Records, Clandestine Industries

◆ Chapter 1: Jersey Basements & the Manhattan Skyline

▪ Everything we were into was tailored to somebody who didn't like to go outside, anyway.

▪ If you had friends at high school who were like, “I'm going to a concert,” they're not in the scene. If you're in the scene, you go to shows.

▪ nobody likes being misunderstood. I'd rather be ignored than misunderstood.

▪ One thing I remember clearly was talking about how it's okay to cry.

◆ Chapter 2: The First Fancy Tour Bus to Pull Up at the Manville Elks Lodge

▪ Isn't that lineup insane? For ten dollars!

◆ Chapter 3: Long Island & the Last Silent Majority Show

▪ There's this sibling rivalry between New Jersey and Long Island, that they kind of seem to hate each other, but are kind of exactly the same. Like Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly in Step Brothers.

◆ Chapter 4: “If Pete Wasn't Playing for Us, He Was Moshing for Us”

▪ I grew up in a very white neighborhood, but was super disconnected from that. I think my parents tried to have us be . . . you know, we'd eat at Ethiopian restaurants but you're just the weird family and I'm like, “I just want to eat my fucking McDonald's,” you know what I mean?

▪ JIM GRIMES: Pete didn't really know how to play bass too well. It was more of an entertainment thing with him, where he had good stage presence.

▪ Pete had cultivated this image for a little while . . . I wouldn't say being thuggy, but being a dude that was a little bit of like . . . how do I put this . . . a dude who's willing to fight.

▪ Pete always had a hustle going on. He was always a hustler. I'll say that till the day I die about that guy. He always had some kind of scam going on, whether for good or bad.

▪ Pete always wanted his own thing to catch on, where he could say, “This is my thing that I built.”

◆ Chapter 6: And Out to the Great Wide Open

▪ I was still young enough that, something bad happens, you call your mom.

◆ Chapter 9: “At the Time, They Were Geoff from Thursday's Weird Friends”

▪ My Chem was the first band I knew that would get ready to go onstage every night. We were dirtball kids; those guys put fucking makeup on.

◆ Chapter 10: The Long Island Lyric Pool

▪ Brand New put out a shirt that said “Mics Are for Singing Not Swinging” and then Taking Back Sunday's response was to put out a shirt that said “Proudly Swinging Since 1999.

◆ Chapter 11: “If Half the People Hate You, the Other Half Are Going to Defend You to the Death”

▪ PETE WENTZ: Everybody's got a dream or whatever. Nobody gives a fuck until you execute it.

▪ Fall Out Boy had just started gaining momentum. They had rabid fans . . . but there were only about thirty of them.

▪ The band Spitalfield wrote this song called “Fairweather Friend,” which was rumored to be about Pete.

▪ Pete developed this thing that was like, “Infamy is bigger than fame.” If half the people hate you, the other half are going to defend you to the death.

◆ Chapter 14: “It Didn't Matter That 99% of Mainstream America Didn't Know Who He Was”

▪ We treated the word “emo” like a dog you're training not to jump up on you. The best way to train that dog is just to ignore the dog.

◆ Chapter 15: Private Jets & Magazine Covers

▪ Like, “What the fuck? People are referencing this shit on SportsCenter?” That's when I knew shit got weird.

▪ Alt Press was the MTV of our scene. The holy grail was the fucking Alt Press cover story.

◆ Chapter 16: “I Remember Playing Hollister. It Was a Riot at the Mall, Basically”

▪ By the time we got signed, Pete was like, “I got the steering wheel now.” And I was fine with that. I just wanted to write music. It takes me longer to write words, anyway.

▪ Towards the end, I think during “Saturday,” the stage couldn't handle the weight of all the people and just kind of collapsed. They had to stop and try to figure out what to do. I remember that night feeling like, “Okay, this is a different thing. This band is gonna be a different thing.”

◆ Chapter 17: “If You Don't Sign This Band, You're Gonna Regret It for the Rest of Your Life”

▪ I never thought they were gonna be the next humongous band in the world; they were a vampire biker band to me. I loved it.

◆ Chapter 18: “Love in the Face of the Apocalypse”

▪ Bunch of Generation X confused-ass old people who were mad that a bunch of young people came along and got bigger than them.

◆ Chapter 19: New Friend Request

▪ I think there's a whole generation of damn good developers today that started because they were social people who liked music and wanted to customize their MySpace pages.

▪ “Is that Patrick Stump on vocals? What is this?”

◆ Chapter 21: Going Down Swinging

▪ To me, I hate going too deep with anything like this because I feel like there's the possibility that you romanticize it. And there's nothing really romantic about it.

◆ Chapter 22: The Eye of the Storm

▪ The My Chem superfan wanted to like, be in the band; they wanted to be close to it and share those feelings. The Fall Out Boy superfans, to me, wanted to sleep with someone in the band.

◆ Chapter 23: “Panic! at the Disco Was Like Pouring Gasoline on the Fire”

▪ Ryan Ross and Brendon Urie were like Lennon and McCartney. Ryan wasn't the most proficient player, but he's a writer. If he got an idea he really believed in, he beat the fuck out of it, looked at every angle, until he was like, “Okay, I've got this one idea. I can't even play it, but this one idea will be huge.” And Brendon is the kind of dude who can play anything. An oboe, a violin—put an instrument in this dude's hand and he'll just get it. He could interpret Ryan like that.

◆ Chapter 25: “Bigger Than Emo”

▪ I don't know how anyone got away with ranking friends, without some kind of World War III erupting across the social stratosphere. It was a different time . . .

◆ Chapter 27: “As Much Mischief As We Could”

▪ Hey, listen, there's this movie called Snakes on a Plane. It's just Samuel L. Jackson cussing the whole time and killing a bunch of snakes and it's gonna be the biggest thing in the world.

▪ This far into their record cycle, they're rock stars. They're wearing mismatched designer shoes, like $1,000 on each foot. Ryan was getting a very intricate tree painted on his face every single night by makeup artists.

◆ Chapter 28: Bridge & Tunnel

▪ Around 2006, there was a big clash between the early 2000s emo and everything that was gonna come after.

◆ Chapter 32: Takeover

▪ GABE SAPORTA: [Who was the best kisser?] Definitely Pete. Maybe tied with William Beckett.

◆ Chapter 35: “They Took the Exclamation Point Off Their Name”

▪ I will say I never liked Panic!; I liked Ryan Ross.

◆ Chapter 36: “When Your Fans Start Dressing Like You, You Gotta Find the Next Thing”

▪ You could tell there was some sort of dissention in the group, so that was the first time it was really only Patrick speaking on behalf of the band, taking me through the songs. I think Folie showed his influence more than Pete's. I think Pete was a little checked out at that point, so for better or worse, Folie is more of a Patrick Stump record.

▪ The front half of the song is just me being miserable, and putting that into song. And the back half of the song became a celebration of the band, and what we had been, up to that point.

◆ Chapter 38: We'll Carry On

▪ Hayley is the iconic alt-rock flower that continues to bloom a different color every season.

▪ Dude, Ryan Ross. What a visionary

▪ PATRICK STUMP: The response to my solo record was even worse than Folie.

▪ I've come to terms that, similar to the term “punk,” emo is in the eye of the beholder. So is emo Rites of Spring and Sunny Day Real Estate, or is emo My Chem and Fall Out Boy? And the answer is “yes.” It is whatever it is to you.

My highlights:

Midnight Sun - Stephenie Meyer (Highlight: 49)

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◆ 1. FIRST SIGHT

▪ It was hard to imagine surviving with senses so incredibly dull.

▪ I was a vampire, and she had the sweetest blood I'd smelled in more than eighty years.

▪ I knew what had to happen now. The girl would have to come sit beside me, and I would have to kill her.

▪ I had never killed innocents. And now I planned to slaughter twenty of them at once.

▪ it would take me, at most, five seconds to end every life in this room.

▪ It was sophistry to think that by saving the nineteen humans in this room with effort and patience, I would be less of a monster when I killed this innocent girl.

▪ I didn't have to go to her home. I didn't have to kill her. Obviously, I was a rational, thinking creature, and I had a choice. There was always a choice.

◆ 5. INVITATIONS

▪ I would not destroy Bella's future. If I was destined to love her, then wasn't avoiding her the very least I could do?

▪ My life was an unending, unchanging midnight. It must, by necessity, always be midnight for me. So how was it possible that the sun was rising now, in the middle of my midnight?

◆ 6. BLOOD TYPE

▪ I didn't know how to do this. How to court her as a normal, human, modern man in the year two thousand and five.

◆ 7. MELODY

▪ Love doesn't always come in convenient packages.

◆ 8. GHOST

▪ I accidentally uprooted the young spruce tree my hand was resting on when he pinched a strand of her hair between his fingers.

▪ I felt an uncomfortable spasm of guilt. Because what I was doing now was not precisely good, but it wasn't anywhere near as bad as my nightly pursuits. I wasn't technically even trespassing now—the base of this tree grew from the next lot over—let alone doing something more felonious. But I knew that when night came, I would continue to do wrong.

◆ 9. PORT ANGELES

▪ “More theories?”
“Mm-hm.” She chewed on another bite, entirely nonchalant. As if she weren't discussing the aspects of a demon with the demon himself.

▪ Suddenly, as she ate, a strange comparison entered my head. For just a second, I saw Persephone, pomegranate in hand. Dooming herself to the underworld.

▪ My skin would disgust her. She would run away.

◆ 10. THEORY

▪ There, at the top of the stairs, was a promising-looking cupboard. I opened it hopefully and found what I was looking for. I selected the thickest blanket from the tiny linen closet and took it back into her room. I would return it before she woke, and no one would be the wiser.
Holding my breath, I cautiously spread the blanket over her. She didn't react to the added weight. I returned to the rocking chair.

◆ 12. COMPLICATIONS

▪ It was oddly consoling to know that I wasn't the only one living out a tragic love story. Heartbreak was everywhere.

▪ Bella was like a soap bubble—fragile and ephemeral. Temporary.

▪ How silly humans were, to let a six-inch height difference confound their happiness.

▪ Why would she laugh at the suggestion that I could kill her, when she knew that it was entirely true?
What was wrong with her?

◆ 13. ANOTHER COMPLICATION

▪ Cursing my curiosity, I returned to my questions.

▪ Perhaps my obvious fascination with every detail of her personality would convince her of the obsessive level of my interest.

▪ if I could have kept it tidy enough to be able to actually walk into it. My room here is bigger and less of a disaster, but that's because I haven't been here long enough make a serious mess.”
I made my face smooth, hiding the fact that I knew very well what her room was like here, and also my surprise that her room in Phoenix had been more cluttered.

▪ “It's twilight,” I said. The time when vampires came out to play—when we never had to fear that a shifting cloud might cause us trouble—when we could enjoy the last remnants of light in the sky without worrying that we would be exposed.

▪ I thought of the stars she'd described in Phoenix and wondered if they were like the stars in Alaska—so bright and clear and close. I wished that I could take her there tonight so we could make the comparison. But she had a normal life to lead.

▪ I felt suddenly sorry that this particular boy was born my enemy. His was the rare kind of mind that was easy to be inside. Restful, almost.

▪ She causes you pain.
I shook my head. “I cause my own pain. It's not her fault.”
It's not your fault, either.
“I am what I am.”
And that's not your fault.

◆ 15. PROBABILITY

▪ Her mind raced through a flipbook of futures. Bella's face from a thousand different angles, always tinted gray, sunless. She was thinner, unfamiliar hollows beneath her cheekbones, deep circles under her eyes, her expression empty. One could call it lifeless—but it would only be a metaphor. Not like the other visions.

▪ I let my head fall into my hands. I felt sick—like a damaged human, a victim of disease.

▪ For a few moments, I thought seriously about killing myself. It was the only way I knew to be sure that the monster didn't survive.

▪ Maybe I was wrong. But if I was right... how exasperating! How endearing! Her life had never been in deeper peril, but she still cared that I, the very menace threatening her life, liked her appearance.

▪ What I was doing was basking, drowning, wallowing in my love for Bella. I didn't think it would be difficult to keep doing that.

◆ 17. CONFESSIONS

▪ And like a fool, I fell back into my immature efforts to be amusing. “I'm not thirsty today, honestly.”
I actually winked at her. One would think I was thirteen instead of a hundred and four.

▪ “I'm here... which, roughly translated, means I would rather die than stay away from you.”

▪ The electricity ricocheted around the inside of my stomach and I wondered why humans had thought to name such a wild sensation butterflies.

◆ 18. MIND OVER MATTER

▪ Tooth and Claw

◆ 23. GOODBYES

▪ Could a dead heart break?

◆ 25. RACE

▪ Edward, it's impossible.
The image of myself astride the sleek black motorcycle was so appealing that for a second I ignored her.

▪ For a tenth of a second, I was back in my Volvo in Forks, thinking of ways to kill myself.

▪ Emmett would never... but maybe Jasper. He alone could feel what I felt. Maybe he would want to end my life, just to escape that pain. But probably he would run away instead. He wouldn't want to hurt Alice. So that left the longer trip to Italy.

◆ 28. THREE CONVERSATIONS

▪ But this wasn't life or death for either of them the way it was for me. That was my life on the gurney. My life, pale and unresponsive, covered in tubes and tape and plaster. I kept myself together as best I could.

▪ Pomegranate seeds and my underworld.

▪ And then I did something I hadn't done in a century.
Curled there in a ball on the floor, motionless with agony... I prayed.

◆ 29. INEVITABILITY

▪ Her eyes focused on the machine beeping out her heart's excesses, and narrowed. “That's going to be embarrassing.”

▪ “I won't,” I told her, while I mentally qualified my answer. Not until you're whole again. Not until you're ready. Not until I find the strength.

▪ Until you're healthy, until you're ready. Until I find the strength I need.

◆ EPILOGUE: AN OCCASION

▪ there were actual tears brimming in her eyes and she had one hand clenched around the door handle as though she wanted to throw herself from the car rather than face the horror of a high school dance.

▪ “So ready for this to be the end,” I sighed, stroking my finger down the side of her face. “For this to be the twilight of your life, though your life has barely started. You're ready to give up everything.”
“It's not the end, it's the beginning,” she whispered.
“I'm not worth it.”

One day I'll finish reading this book (I've stopped at halfway through over a year ago because it's so bad) but for now 0/10 would not recommend, equally cringey as sad girls. Not being intentionally mean; I enjoyed all her poetry books before her fiction attempts.

I will say though that not only does it feel like the biggest cop-out to never include any of Verity's “god-tier” level writing (but I get it, taste is subjective) but to then have scenes like when she first reads her poetry to a group and it goes like “I started reading my poetry, I was so scared and nervous, but everyone gasped the entire time and by the end everyone was crying and applauding me saying they'd never heard anything so beautiful” especially as this reads entirely as a self-insert fanfic.

Also the amount of complaints about the ‘haters' who ‘hate-review' books just to be mean is clearly Lang being triggered and offended that people don't like her fiction books. Get over yourself.


MY DRAFTED REVIEW FROM WHILE I WAS READING:

“I hated everything about this book. Nothing about it works. The characters are unrelatable but also unbelievable. No one has any depth at all.”
- The opening to my review for Sad Girls, which also applies here.

This book is trash and let me tell you why. If you're a normal sane person and you also read Sad Girls, you understand. This book is the same. I might be all over the place but there's just so much crap.

Spoilers ahead.

Poemsia is a book about a girl who writes poetry and works in a bookstore. We're supposed to believe her poetry is the holy grail of anything ever written, yet we're conveniently never shown anything she writes. I understand this could be because taste is subjective, but it still just feels like a cop out. Also we're supposed to believe that the bookstore she works at is “the last one in Sydney that still has a poetry section” and honestly, this entire book is too full of itself.

Just like the main character in Sad Girls, Verity Wolf is very aloof and unaware of reality and gets everything handed to her, completely unrealistically. She idolizes this one poet who got famous by being discovered through some site. Her best friend Jessica says things like “you could be famous too, your poetry is better!” and then decides to take on the role of publicist, gathering Verity's poems, and putting them together in the form of a physical book with a beautiful cover that Jessica designed but I can't remember what was nice about it.

Verity ends up getting her poetry noticed through Instagram and then people actually start buying her book, and obviously it shoots up to #1 on the bestseller charts or something.

She meets this guy at the bookstore who goes by the nickname Sash because of course he does. Lang Leav's one and only way of adding character depth to the Love Interest seems to be by giving him a fun nickname. (At least Sash is more bearable than “Duck”). He's older and we're supposed to believe that they're instant soul mates and they love each other immediately. He's also pretentious and they bond over how they're the only people left who like classic literature and that hipster bookstore.

He has cool friends but most importantly this one bitchy hot girl who Verity is jealous of immediately because Sash and her have a long messy history of dating and hooking up. This girl is also pretentious, the most out of everyone in this book as this is her main character trait, and she likes to trash on every book ever written aside from a handful of classics or current unknowns. However she might be the only two dimensional character in this book as she's shown to be caring, generous and charitable in her personal life when she's not being an absolute snob in some indie café. Also she hates Verity because she's hung up on Sash even though he's clearly an idiot who thinks the love of his life is some wide-eyed nineteen year old that he just met.

After a couple dates they have a scene on a rooftop where they tell each other they're in love and she says “what is this?” and he says “I don't know, maybe ... the rest of our lives?” like honestly what kind of douchebag. And then they do it in his car but it's “romantic” and it's revealed that she's only ever done it with one other guy, also in a car.

Also Verity thinks her friends are better and more normal than Sash's friends but they're also crap. At one point the coffee shop that Jessica's boyfriend works at is closing or something and they're like “oh no! This is the ONLY good coffee shop around, where are we going to go now?” Like. Literally anywhere.

I hated everything about this book. Nothing about it works. The characters are unrelatable but also unbelievable. No one has any depth at all.

spoilers ahead.

And fucking Audrey was the worst. Throughout the whole book, she just relies on handouts and luck. Nothing in real life happens like in this book. She's just spoiled and incredibly childish.

Every person in this book was only there to enable Audrey into doing something. Angie was introduced and immediately encouraged her to leave Duck. Gabe was introduced to immediately offer her driving lessons. Maud was introduced to immediately coddle her for some reason. Etc. There's no one she knows who isn't overly nice to her. Think about it.

Another thing; when she met Rad, and then again with Gabe, I had to read the same crap about how they had an immediate connection that felt SO deep and it felt like they'd known each other forever and they could talk about anything.

And Duck was only every there as “the boyfriend before Rad.” Thier so-called rocky relationship wasn't an issue before Rad. But Audrey was still a shit girlfriend. And I just hated having to read the name Duck and take it seriously (Brian Duckman, friends call him Duck)

Also, after Audrey CHEATED on duck with a guy she JUST met, who was also her dead friend's boyfriend, why on earth would Duck's mother keep being nice to Audrey? Consoling her and inviting her in for tea? Unrealistic.

The passing of time is also very shitty in this book. One minute, it's day by day, then something is immediately referenced as having happened months ago. I have no idea how old she's supposed to be by the end of this book.

The writing style, for the most part, sucked. I tried to look past all the overdone prose, I really did, because I get that she's just trying really hard to be poetic. Which overall, was done horribly. But what really got me was
“I dug into my handbag and took out the brown envelope, running my fingers across the ink where Rad had dragged his pen in the shape of my name.” aka, where he'd written my name.

This really felt like a teen book, from the thick pages to the oversized font. I finished this book in two days, and not because I liked it. I can't remember the last time I hated a book this much.

Also “I didn't want to think too much about what I would do next—where I would live and how to pay my bills. I just hoped that my luck would hold out and something would turn up.” That's basically the entire book.

She's just teen angst, moves out, then moves a bunch more times with seemingly no belongings. Passages about not having much money, and then making plans to road trip around the world with Gabe. And then just flying back home.

But also she got her driver's license with what, plans to keep driving Gabe's car? And then Rad's car? And then boasted about her independence?

There wasn't enough character development for anyone other than Rad.

And what was with the scene where Rad, for some reason, tells Audrey “I don't want to date another sad girl.” before they started dating. It was implying he didn't want her to kill herself, like Ana did, but later you find out that isn't even applicable because Ana didn't kill herself. Rad did, accidentally but instead of attempting to save her, slits her wrists and throws her in a bath to make it look like a suicide.

This whole book was cringeworthy and I wanted it to end.

They're shitty people who killed their friend and nothing happened to them for it. They live happily ever after, Rad getting a big shot movie deal for a book he JUST got accepted for publishing, and they're moving to LA? Because that's realistic.

Audrey never pays for the stupid lie, Rad never pays for the fucked up stuff he did, and now they “need” each other. Audrey's parents fade from the picture completely.

This book just let me down because I've really liked her poetry.

“on most nights.
you're in love, heartbroken or
both
lying there restless
watching the night bleed into
the morning
wishing you had more hours to
rest”

This series never failed to amaze me and immediately after finishing, I reread Unwind four years after first reading it to remind myself why it's usually the first book I recommend to people. The characters have come so far, these stories are engrossing, twisted, and believable as ever. These characters will always stick with me.

I read this book in one sitting and I loved it, the writing is perfect and really makes you feel something, I'll definitely read this a couple more times and highlight so many parts

I wanted to love this book and I wonder if I would have had I read it at sixteen. As an adult I can take it with a grain of salt and see past the underlying and probably accidental lesson.

(slight spoiler)

This girl literally is content doing nothing forever, until an interesting boy comes along and makes her long for more. Teenage girls don't need to be saved by teenage boys. Worse, real life teenage boys suck. Call me bitter but I couldn't get around the constant hopeful tone that this dream boy was everything she ever needed.

Past that, this book was interesting and still worth the read.