Review: A story that starts rough and evolves into something fresh and new.....
Rating: 3 out of 5
Date: 07 14, 2014
The author’s publisher, Curiosity Quills Press, gave me a copy of this novel in exchange for my review.Emma starts out as a fairly stereotypical loner. She’s been bullied by classmates, made to feel inferior and inadequate by her mother (her father’s much younger trophy wife) and generally is afraid to make friends because they will eventually find her strange and unworthy and reject her. She is petulant and somewhat intellectually elitist even before Mike’s death but she has a wistful nature that inspires empathy. Emma, in the aftermath of Mike’s death, doesn’t handle herself in the best way making things worse and her more sensitive to the critical stares of others and she’s conscious of that to an extent.A funny thing happened on the way to the dead guy, Emma became someone you wanted to win. She brings her first dead guy, Sam, back. He’s an aspiring medical student who threw himself into the river. When Emma and Sam involve themselves in the troubles of a fellow student and Emma seems to become less obsessed with the wholly unattractive loser she feels herself to be, she stops being a Disney movie cookie-cutter and becomes more a real person. Emma has a focus beyond herself and that focus acts as a bit of a photo developer for the other issues in her life.Ann Noser’s “How to Date Dead Guys” is something of a diamond in the rough. Noser’s story-line is fresh and unique. The way she wraps the story is nothing sort of amazing. She makes clear to the audience when Emma embarks on her witchcraft experiment that the desire to act is born from the depths of despair and that Emma doesn’t know what will happen so we’ll just find out along with her. Each back from the water character grows her knowledge and her confidence in her powers.“How to Date Dead Guys” has a clear direction in it’s plotting and the author seems to pace what she reveals to both Emma and the audience. It’s a story of a girl becoming that she’s meant to be and embracing her unique talents. Or, for this reader, a story that started with rolling eyes and ended with a true interest in the character and her abilities.