Review: Ready? OK!
Rating: 3 out of 5
Date: 04 23, 2012
Tiki Tinklemeyer (love the name) is moving to a new town, and is being bustled off to cheer camp by her adoptive parents in order to meet new friends. This is bad news for Tiki, who is a be-speckled klutz who can't walk a straight line, and is more inclined to read books than spin cartwheels. And of course, the camp has a haunted past.The premise was pretty good. The characters were well-thought, well-drawn, and pretty easy to imagine...and hear! We followed along with the mystery, trying to figure out who was behind the happenings...was it a ghost? Or human? There were no plot holes that tripped the reader.I thought the cheerleader slang was a little over the top. I wouldn't be able to have more than a 5 minute conversation with any of the girls...except maybe Tiki. Though some of the slang was creative and quite clever, I would have preferred to have it toned down and mixed with a little normal kid-speak.I didn't buy that Tiki, who couldn't walk a straight line on day one of camp, was one of the best tumblers by day 5. That seemed a stretch to me, unless Tiki has some kind of super power that we weren't made aware of!The voice of the parents bothered me a bit...I believe they were meant to be portrayed as highly intelligent, but it came off sounding like two people *trying* to sound highly intelligent.For me, the story ended abruptly with an epilogue that hinted at a supernatural angle. This is fine, except it wasn't set up properly in the story, so it seemed to come out of the blue. I literally looked at that last page and said, "What the hell was that?" The story played out as a pure mystery, except for the one or 2 hints of the supernatural; however, the supernatural story-line was never fleshed out. In fact, the epilogue seemed attached to the wrong story. It's voice was even different, as though the event that ended the story abruptly was a life-changing event for Tiki...except we never got to *see* it. The reader is left with no clue as to what happened.I get the feeling that a lot of the unanswered questions are meant to be addressed in book 2, but I would prefer to have a story stand on its own merit, and not rely on sequels to finish it.