Megan Crewe snips away the frilling that most YA books hoard in large amounts. You know, that slight glow of the promise if teenage utopia that promises that bad things will be solved by the last page. That there is a prince charming (who is perfect in every manner possible) on the other side of the corsage. Instead, she gives us Cass. Bitter, hurting Cass who has been alienated at school, humiliated, left alone in her grief. She's persona non grata with her classmates and it seems that she's invisible to her parents. But she has secrets, the most major one of them being her sister, yes the dead one, in ghost form. And her sister is not the only ghost she sees. She has an information network at school, consisting of less than corporal forms who provide her with the juiciest gossip about those same classmates. Because a girl needs leverage if she's going to survive the hallowed hallways of high school. If I were to sum the story up in one word, I'd say it's gritty. Megan Crewe portrays the debilitating effects of grief in its rawest form. Not through Cass, who would be the obvious choice but through Tim. And it's only when she tries to deal with his grief that she fully confronts hers. The characters are in the book are caricatures of themselves; being so fractured by their loss that they have forgotten that living is more than just existing. Giving up the Ghost is, I believe, not really a story of letting go and moving on but a story about living with the ghosts, of remembering and in doing so, finding the strength in yourself to live on.
