This review is spoiler-free.Last month, me and two friends decided to read a book together. They said: "it was your idea, so you get to pick the book". Well, I picked five books. And then they chose this one among those five. This is to say: the blame for the choice will be equally distributed!(And I hope that we'll read other, better books together!)I've read so many good things about this book in other reviews, I'm starting to think that maybe the one I've just read was not the same one they wrote about. Or maybe aliens are involved. Who knows.Amelia is a cemetery restorer who can see ghosts.Pretty intriguing, uh? As it turned out, not so much. That's because ghosts have no other purpose and apparently nothing better to do than leech energy from the living; but if you can get on hallowed ground or act like you're not seeing them, they leave you alone. So: every time Amelia sees something ghostly, she simply looks the other way and starts thinking about how hot her love interest is.That got on my nerves pretty quickly.The mystery is nothing to write home about. That part of the plot is completely overshadowed by a bad case of instalove. The two haven't even said "hello" to each other and this is what she thinks: Tall, broad-shouldered and dressed all in black, he might have stepped from the dreamy hinterland of some childhood fable. I could barely make out his features, but I knew instinctively that he was handsome and brooding. The way he carried himself, the almost painful glare of his eyes through the mist, sent icy needles stinging down my spine.From that moment on, it's a non-stop series of tingles, shivers, shocks, electric currents and so on and so forth. It's a nice compendium of standards for male hotness; from the hands:He glanced down at the picture and I stared down at his hands. They were strong and graceful, those hands. And warm.(Sure you know they are warm just looking at them.)to the eyes, of course: Devlin’s secretive eyes and brooding demeanor were powerful libations to a closet romantic like me.to everything else that just makes her all hot and bothered: The weakness I’d experienced in his presence was nothing more than a physical manifestation of my attraction to him.A fainting couch, presto!Even when things get more complicated and some ghost decides to be more proactive, Amelia's reactions encompass the whole gamut of the uselessness: calling the love interest, stalking the love interest, thinking about her love interest... well, you get it. She's always afraid of something, even when it feels like nothing really is happening.She's never doing anything important to change the course of events.She is non-confrontational, meek and lifeless.All in all, it was a very boring read, sometimes dotted with some interesting bits (a secret society, really? Uh, there's a hidden chamber in the cemetery!), but too little to keep my attention and definitely too little to compensate the tons of hot-shivery-manly-maleness freely dumped everywhere.
