Paper Valentine - Brenna Yovanoff

This review is also on Living for the Books

The first couple pages were amazing. I mean ghosts and murder? Doesn't that sound interesting? Too bad it wasn't all about the murder.

The characters were kind of average, except for Lillian but I'll get to her later. I have mixed feelings about the main character, Hannah. There was nothing about her that made me dislike her, but I wasn't exactly rooting for her either. The not so average thing about Hannah is that she can see ghosts. This is never really explained, but that didn't really bother me too much. Basically Hannah is haunted by her dead best friend.

I feel like the romance was just not needed. Finny was the typical bad boy and of course Hannah falls in love with him.Their relationship didn't add anything to the story for me, it was just kind of there and I tolerated it...kind of. The murders were way more important than the romance, but guess which one trumped the other? That's right, the romance.

But the romance didn't take center stage either. Instead I think that this book was mostly about Hannah dealing with the loss of her best friend, Lillian. Lillian had anorexia and Hannah did practically nothing to help her best friend get better. Even though Lillian's dead she still has a huge influence on Hannah and on their other friends.

I wish the murders had been more important to the story. The ending felt so rushed and it was really obvious (to me) who the murderer was. At first I had no idea who the murderer was, but when I started thinking about it I was able to figure it out pretty quick.

Overall I I liked Paper Valentine but I didn't think it was anything special. I was looking for a murder mystery but instead I got something else.