Main Characters: Rebecca, Lisette, Anton

Summary:

Rebecca couldn’t feel more out of place in New Orleans, where she comes to spend the year while her dad is traveling. She’s staying in a creepy old house with her aunt. And at the snooty prep school, the filthy-rich girls treat Rebecca like she’s invisible. Only gorgeous, unavailable Anton Grey seems to give Rebecca the time of day, but she wonders if he’s got a hidden agenda. Then one night, in Lafayette Cemetery, Rebecca makes a friend. Sweet, mysterious Lisette is eager to talk to Rebecca, and to show her the nooks and crannies of the city. There’s just one catch: Lisette is a ghost.

A ghost with a deep, dark secret, and a serious score to settle.

As Rebecca learns more from her ghost friend — and as she slowly learns to trust Anton Grey — she also uncovers startling truths about her own history. Will Rebecca be able to right the wrongs of the past, or has everything been ruined beyond repair?

Anna’s Thoughts:

I think that it’s pretty obvious by now that I love ghost stories and stories about the south. But not just any south, not the picket fences lining the well-kept streets south, but the spooky south. The South that is littered with ghost stories, haunted houses, crazy vine covered cemeteries and family secrets. Ruined is all of these things and so much more – so much more even that I am kind of sad that I won it in a contest instead of having bought it. Although Ruined is a ghost story, it’s more of a book that has a ghost in it verses being a spooky ghost story.

The plot is strung together in such a way that you’re always guessing what will happen next, you can try to form ideas or your own lines of reasoning for characters and their actions but you never really know what is going on until it actually happens. Ruined keeps you on the edge of your seat the entire time drawing lines to connect events and people until finally you can’t take it anymore and get to the point in the story where it all comes undone. The way the characters lives and pasts – and futures – were wound together was absolutely incredible, and I loved every bit of it. The entire thing is built up from the very beginning when Rebecca meets Lisette to the very last pages when everything in it’s entirety comes spilling out. The truth, the lies, the beginnings and the tragic yet satisfying end. There is not a page I skipped, skimmed, didn’t care for or found useless, the entire story was absolutely perfect.

Not to mention the characters, Rebecca was a stupid stupid girl, but still strong – she made a lot of mistakes but didn’t try talking her way out of them or blaming someone else for what she had done. She took responsibility for her mistakes and moved on – although, not learning very much in the process as she kept repeating them. She however is a teenager uprooted from her home and her very different life into something she didn’t know and didn’t understand, which I’m sure didn’t help when it felt like everyone around her was keeping secrets from her. She however she was likable, there isn’t a tiny little piece of me that doesn’t like her, she was very well written character. AND LISETTE! I loved how much we learn about her and how intertwined her story is with everyone elses, and yet how much she just wants to be where she belongs. I never got the sense that she held any grudges or that she was a malicious type ghost intent on doing harm. The only thing that really bothered me about any of the characters was less about the actual character and more about how she was written, the issue being Lisette’s dialect. Lisette died around 1854, and yet she speaks as if she had lived in modern times. Now my mother made the argument that maybe she had just picked up the more current dialects from being around for so long, but the thing about that – which you’ll see if you read it – is that Lisette is quite limited in her human interaction. Not only that every generation creates it’s own speech, while some things carry on and others are universally called by certain names, things do change, and almost every area/region has differences in accents and I myself just don’t find it very believable that Lisette would be so well versed in modern languages having actually been alive a hundred and fifty-five years ago. Other then that one problem though I loved her, and Rebecca and Anton and the other side characters. They all had their places, and their roles, and they were very well written into them. The only thing that truly disappoints about Ruined is that it won’t have a sequel.