Enjoy For Free A Girl, A Ghost, And The Hollywood Hills By Lizabeth Zindel In EReader Version

love this book. I had a very good time reading it, I actually just borrowed it from my best friend, She told me that it was nice and offered it to me, So, I said yes. The story's a mix of romance and mystery! It's a MUST read! If I were you, I'd buy this book immediately, You'll love it. : one of the worst books I've ever had to read for school, pls stay away unless you love bad, outoftouch dialogue that sounds like an alien impersonating Californian teenagers, This is quite possibly the worst book I've ever read, I had a blast ripping it apart in the GroupMe with my class though,
The writing is bad, the main character is unlikeable, the ending is so far from satisfying, Would not recommend! Isn't even one of those "so bad it's kind of good" : This book had potential, It was an interesting take on Hamlet, but the more I read, the more I thought my time would've been better spent scraping gum off the bottom of library tables.
Started out good enough, ended like crap,
The ending was a little openended, . . is there a sequel in the future I knew going in this book would probably just be a quick, fun read at most with a little Shakespearean influence going on.
And for a good bit of it, I did enjoy it,

Then came the "twist" ending it's not really a twist, but for the lack of a better word, it'll work, and it just fell apart for me.
It's about a girl who's working through her grief over the loss of her mom, and it has its good moments, If that was the entire book, then it would be fine, If it was a straightup homage to Hamlet, then that would be fine, Instead it is a mishmash of the two that doesn't work, as if two halffinished stories were tied up together instead, I really disliked this book, feeling like I was getting in for a supernatural murder mystery, but was sorely disappointed, Instead it was about a spoiled little rich girl who is having issues over the death of her mother and becomes delusional, the "romance" is too unrealistic and boring, Only finsihed it because I was hoping for a twist ending, This had so many holes in it I don't even know where to start, I typically really enjoy modernizations of Shakespeare, . . and I was enjoying this until I hit this sentence: "And our eyes were pools, but not pools of tar, where parts of the past got stuck and died.
" Granted, they were at the La Brea Tarpits in this scene, . . but still. It's been a few years since I've read this but as far as I remember it was a great book I'm a little torn on ths one.
The writing is excellent. The characters are pretty engaging, BUT the plot development and relationships in this book were overdone or underdone,

The book begins with the promise of supernatural events, but ends with a person coming to grips with emotional and mental turmoil caused by the trauma of a mentally ill parent taking her own life.


The character of Oliver, the love interest, is often flat and largely unbelievable, He almost seems like a forced ingredient in the story,

The relationship between the father and the aunt is disturbing and disrespectful on so many levels to the teen character, yet the story justifies it in the end.
At the very least most people wait a year or two to move in on a widow or widower of any kind, especially when kids are involved.


The mental illness of the mother is discussed in passing and there is not enough depth to the discussions on how it impacted the heroine or her father.
If the book had to highlight the tragedy of a mentally ill person killing themselves, the least it could have done was give the complexity of the disease more air time in the story.


A book that did a good job of conveying what this book failed to do was MAD LOVE by Suzanne Selfors, That book combined a parent with a mental illness with actual supernatural events and often did it with sharp wit and irony while still conveying the complexity of life with the mental disease.

.stars. This spinoff is more cheerful than the play on which it's based, but it's sort of dull overall, There is instalove, the progression of the story and the characters themselves aren't very engaging, and the climax falls flat, The story has occasional sweet and interesting moments, An okay read. I loved it! I didn't want to put the book down! I wanna know what happens next! : Holly has problems, Her mom died, and her dad has taken up with her mom's sister, Claudia, which is pretty oogy, Something that may or may not be her mom's ghost is crying out for vengeance, and Holly doesn't know whether to trust it or not, Everyone in Holly's life has names that start with the same letter as characters in Hamlet, only genderreversed, That's not a problem per se, but Holly has apparently never heard of Hamlet, which makes me think the curriculum in that fancy Eastcoast prep school she attends is distinctly problematic, and it's sad for Holly, because she's missing out on a great work of literature.


Holly narrates. Her voice is uncomplicated, but offers some oddball details, and rather a lot of passive voice: "Three days later it was Christmas, It was the first one without my mom and I went through the motions like a cheerleading zombie in one of my aunt's movies, " The tone suggests early on that the

Holly's tale won't end in a Shakespearean onlyanheirsurvives bloodbath, but it's not initially clear if the ghost is to be trusted/not to be trusted/not really there, or what the outrightborrow/vaguelyevoke ratio will be between Hamlet's plot and the novel's.
I figured the answers out before Holly did, but then, I'm apparently better read, The denouement was a bit more involving than I expected it to be, if a little pat/tidy I was definitely emotionally invested enough to pull for Holly to make choices leading toward a positive outcome.


Rounding up.seems generous, butseems harsh, I do not like how I was pretty much promised paranormal and all I got was normal, This book was kind of weird, . .
It had an awesome idea, but I was disappointed by the "ghost, "
It seemed kind of misleading,
And the relationship between her and Oliver was flat,
He seemed kind of drama queenish,
I dunno, I guess it could've been a lot better, As if her mother's death wasn't hard enough to process, Holly's father spring the worst news on her at the worst possible time, He's dating someone: his dead wife's sister, It's just too sick for Holly to think about, But she's forced to deal with both her father and his new zombie loving girlfriend, Aunt Claudia, a horror film producer, It's only a few weeks, and it should be relatively easy to avoid them both since her father is always working and Aunt Claudia doesn't live her.


But things have changed since the last time Holly was home from school, Her father still works a lot, but not as much as he used to meaning he's home a lot more, And worst of all, Aunt Claudia has moved in, Okay, no big deal Holly thinks, She'll just have to try harder to avoid them, that's all, And besides, It's only a few weeks, With the help of best friend Felicia and new boyfriend Oliver, winter break will fly by and Holly won't really have to deal with them,

That is, until her deceased mother pays Holly a very unexpected visit asking Holly to seek revenge on the one person she's trying to stay as far away from as possible Aunt Claudia.


A Girl, A Ghost, and the Hollywood Hills is a very loose rewrite of William Shakespeare's famed play Hamlet, Even though author Lizabeth Zindel doesn't stick closely to the original storyline, readers will see enough similarities within the text to see where inspiration was drawn from.


The only real flaw I found to this book was the California slang, It sometimes felt a bit over the top and stereotypical, For example, when Holly and best friend refer to each other as "dudette" at times,

Zindel is a strong writer who doesn't beat around the bush, Plunging into the meat of A Girl, A Ghost, and the Hollywood Hills from the start Zindel's book is a quick and fun read, But what really makes it what it is, is her heroin Holly, Holly's determined, passionate almost to the point of obsessive when it comes to seeking revenge, but most of all, she's real,
.