[Review: Life After Theft by Aprilynne Pike]

"Life After Theft"
Author: Aprilynne Pike
Pages: 352
Genre: YA Paranormal
Date Published: April 30th, 2013
Publisher: HerperTeen
Format Read: eARC provided by publisher (via Edelweiss) for honest review

-------------------------------------------------------------

Summary:

 Moving to a new high school sucks. Especially a rich-kid private school. With uniforms. But nothing is worse than finding out the first girl you meet is dead. And a klepto.

No one can see or hear Kimberlee except Jeff, so--in hopes of bringing an end to the snarkiest haunting in history--he agrees to help her complete her "unfinished business." But when the enmity between Kimberlee and Jeff's new crush, Sera, manages to continue posthumously, Jeff wonders if he's made the right choice.

Clash meets sass in this uproarious modern-day retelling of Baroness Orczy's The Scarlet Pimpernel.

-Goodreads

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

My Thoughts:

This is one of those books that I totally judged by it's cover.  For some reason I thought that this book was about something entirely different than what it ended up being about.  And in most ways that ended up being a great thing.  This book was funny and full of attitude.  It's about a dead girl and the only guy who can see her.  It's about their journey to return all of the junk that her kleptomaniac hands had been stealing for years and all of the drama of high school on top of that. 

I loved that it was told from a male POV (something that I wasn't expecting).  Jeff was an honest high school guy just trying to get his ducks in a row and he had a great personality that made you almost believe that the odd things that were happening to him could possibly, actually happen.  I mean how many guys to you know who are being haunted by one of the bitchiest dead cheerleaders you've ever met.  Honestly, I just adored Jeff to pieces.  He seemed like such an awesome guy.

I also have to applaud Pike for writing a really snarky and bitchy character in our resident ghost Kimberlee.  In a way I liked that she never really changed.  This could have been a story about learning to grow and become a better person, but Pike chooses to keep Kimberlee's character extremely consistent.  Did it make Kimberlee likeable?  Nope, it didn't.  I didn't like her very much, even though I did enjoy reading her antics.  But in a way I think that Pike's choice to make Kimberlee stuck in her ways made her character more real.  I didn't feel like I was reading something that would necessarily have a happy ending and I liked that.

I'm not quite sure how I felt about Jeff and Sera's relationship, but I do like how Pike used her secondary characters, including Sera's brother Mikhail.  I actually liked their brother/sister relationship more than Jeff and Sera's love.  I guess the love story was very high school, so that's a good thing.  

When it comes down to it, I wanted some really cool explanations about where Kimberlee was going to go in the end.  I wanted to be told something concrete.  Anything concrete, but what we got was Jeff telling us he was agnostic and than not really committing to telling Kimberlee where he thought she would go.  In the end it seemed like he didn't care, even though his actions would suggest otherwise and that was a huge let down for me.  Though I did like the very end (as in the last couple of sentences) of the novel.  

So, if you want to read a book with a bitchy ghost who never changes, a guy with a great POV and a really interesting plot then this one will work for you. 

Rating:

    3 Unicorns = I liked it a lot, but it had it's issues!