Spirit and Dust by Rosemary Clement-Moore

Pages: 304

Edition: Kindle

Publisher: Delecorte/ May 14, 2013

Price: $10.99 on Amazon

Reading Challenges: Women Authors, Where Are You Reading? (Minnesota)

★★★★★★★☆☆☆

Don’t get me wrong. For the most part, I enjoyed Spirit and Dust. I liked the whole tie in with history and some scenes were seriously straight out of the horror version of Night at the Museum (but, really, isn’t that movie kind of freaky anyway?).

Rosemary Clement-Moore is a fantastic writer, but I think I may have been a little too excited and too enamored with the idea of this being an offshoot of her previous novel, Texas Gothic (which I loved).

Aside from sharing a last name, Spirit and Dust’s Daisy Goodnight has very little in common with her cousins, Amy and Phin, from Texas Gothic. Amy and Phin were unique and quirky, characters I hadn’t seen before. Daisy, well, she can communicate with dead people and uses her ability to help solve murders. Where have I read that plotline a billion times before?

Really, though, Daisy had a promising start with, “I like to pretend I’m all Daisy Goodnight, kick-ass teen psychic when really most of the time I’m all Please don’t let me puke in front of the FBI.” I laughed and thought, “I’m really going to like this girl.” I mean, sure she’s a little cliché and, yeah, it’s a little much that the government pulls her out of school and flies her across the country to solve a murder and kidnapping like no one else could do it (she’s really not that special), but at least she has a sense of humor.

But when the action begins, Daisy’s personality just seems to wane. She talks a lot about how amazing her talents are and how coveted she is, yet she doesn’t seem all that amazeballs. Aside from communicating with the dead (which, okay, is quite an ability, but I’ve seen more talented mediums…in other books), she is kind of dense. Daisy is a contradiction, but not in a good way. She claims to be an “old soul” and acts like she’s so jaded, but she's really just like any other emo teenager who thinks the world doesn’t get them. Move on.

The plot, on the other hand, was pretty decent. I loved how Clement-Moore tied in theology, history, archeology, and probably a few other things that end in “y” that I can’t think of right now. I liked how Daisy was able to tap into her own genealogy to help her along (although it was a little convenient that her ancestors would happen to have intimate experience with the subject of her current predicament).

After a healthy dose of Suspension of Disbelief pills, it was all pretty brilliant.

And the big “show down” between good and evil at the end? Well, it was pretty badass and there were quite a few surprises that I didn’t see coming.