Now Entering Addamsville by Francesca Zappia

Summary from Goodreads:

Zora Novak has been framed.

When someone burns down the home of the school janitor and he dies in the blaze, everyone in Addamsville, Indiana, points a finger at Zora. Never mind that Zora has been on the straight and narrow since her father was thrown in jail. With everyone looking for evidence against her, her only choice is to uncover the identity of the real killer. There’s one big problem—Zora has no leads. No one does. Addamsville has a history of tragedy, and thirty years ago a similar string of fires left several townspeople dead. The arsonist was never caught.

Now, Zora must team up with her cousin Artemis—an annoying self-proclaimed Addamsville historian—to clear her name. But with a popular ghost-hunting television show riling up the townspeople, almost no support from her family and friends, and rumors spinning out of control, things aren’t looking good. Zora will have to read between the lines of Addamsville’s ghost stories before she becomes one herself.

Review:

I loved Eliza and her Monsters. I also love supernatural stories. Hearing that Zappia was coming out with a book for fans of Buffy and Stranger Things was pretty much the best news ever. Sadly, I found it a little disappointing. Maybe my expectations were too high. Also, it was definitely not like Buffy or Stranger Things. It was a lot like the show Supernatural (which I love), and it super reminded me of the comedic episodes with the fake ghost hunters who were filming a ghost show. Except in this book, there was no humor.

It was hard to shelve this book on Goodreads because I wanted to put it with paranormal romance books, but there is no romance. It’s paranormal for sure. And the main character did refer to herself once as asexual, so there’s that. And that’s awesome. There’s not a lot of asexual main characters in YA. And she’s also missing two fingers from something that went down with a fire. So, she’s totally badass.  It didn’t necessarily need romance to be good. But, weirdly, I really felt it missing here. I needed something to juxtapose the darkness. If it wasn’t going to be romance, then it needed to be humor. And there was no humor either….

It was a unique ghost story. Zora could see ghosts, but not hear them. No one else could see them. And her cousin could sense them. I did love their growing friendship. I found myself looking forward to all the scenes with them together. There’s a ton of mystery surrounding her missing mother. I found her dad’s side story fascinating. He went to jail for conning everyone in town. In response, the whole town hates Zora and it’s really hard for her to show that she’s being framed for things when no one likes her.

Her family was interesting. The town was interesting. And the ghost story was unique. What was lacking was weirdly character development. I never felt truly invested in any of the characters. I kept mixing up the side characters. And Zora was just so moody/hard to like for most of the story. I did want her to succeed and clear her name. She just kept annoying me. Also, the pacing was off. It was way too slow/repetitive for a supernatural story. Many pages of nothing happening had me putting the book down a lot. I almost didn’t finish it. But, I did want to see how things would resolve.

I still have a lot of questions, particularly about Zora’s family, so I’m thinking there will be a second book? It hasn’t been announced yet, but there’s just so much left unanswered. All in all I give this one a 7/10.