Shannon Parker lives on the Atlantic coast in a house full of boys. She’s traveled to over three dozen countries and has a few dozen more to go. She works in education and can usually be found rescuing dogs, chickens, old houses and wooden boats. Shannon has a weakness for chocolate chip cookies and ridiculous laughter—ideally, at the same time. Find her at www.shannonmparker.com
Title: The Rattled Bones
Genre: YA Paranormal Mystery
Author: S. M. Parker
Publisher: Simon Pulse
Publication: August 22nd 2017
Cover Rating: 4/5
If you are looking for a book that is mysterious but also contains some deeper topics, then this is the book for you. Some things this books deals with are death and grieving a loved one, making hard choices, dealing with issues in a relationship, racism and it teachs you how to catch lobsters. Diverse, right? Oh, and ghosts. I mentioned ghosts right? Ghosts.....
Rilla is our main character and she starts this book out grieving the death of her father. Her family lives in a fishing town and he died at sea while she was with a friend. That caused her a lot of grief and she blamed herself. This led to a lot of anger at the wrong people and to her second guessing everything in her life. With her father gone, Rilla has no choice but to pick up where he left off with their fishing boat. She is excellent at what she does but the people in her community don't want a girl doing their jobs. So not only does Rilla have to deal with her dads passing, she had to deal with sexism in the 21st century.
The beginning of the book was a bit slow. I don't think it was SLOW exactly, it just wasn't drawing me in enough and that is what made it seem slow. After the first twenty pages I kind of got into the book more. I was worried it was just going to be a contemporary book about loss and I misinterpreted the cover or something. Luckily, we moved along and things started going in the more mysterious/paranormal direction I was hoping for.
Not only does Rilla no longer have her father but she lost her mother a long time ago too. She holds a lot of resentment towards her mother, you will find out about all that if you read the book. So with both of her parents gone, she lives with her grandmother whom she loves dearly. She also has Reed, her boyfriend of two years and her best friend Hattie. There is some rocky waters with both parties. Then, one day, Rilla meets Sam. Sam is on an island near Rilla's home trying to dig up some history about the people who once inhabited it. People Rilla knows nothing about. Until now.
Although the book is almost four-hundred pages, it flew by rather fast. I really appreciated the way the book flowed together and the lack of romance in the novel. As I have previously stated in many other reviews, sometimes romance in the plot seriously takes away from the story itself. I found the historical aspect of the book to be really cool, the things that happened to the people in this book were NOT cool but the fact that it was almost one-hundred years later and people could still learn about them was very interesting.
Unfortunately I guessed the twist in the story very early. I knew it was coming but the path it took to get there was a really great adventure. I feel like Rilla needed this situation in order to move on from her fathers death.
In the end, I was so glad that Rilla ended up going down the path she did. This book was so much more than a ghost story. It was a story about survival, pain and the injustices dealt out by people who think they can play God. I just hope she can maybe form a relationship with the person she wrote a letter to at the end of the book.
Overall, I gave the book 4.5/5 stars.
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