Blog 23 - Possess by Gretchen McNeil Review

 

Author: Gretchen McNeil

Format: Hardcover

Pages: 379

Publisher: Balzer + Bray

Publication Date: 23 August 2011

ISBN-13: 9780062060716

About the book

Fifteen-year-old Bridget Liu just wants to be left alone: by her over-protective mom, by Matt Quinn, the cute son of a local police sergeant and by the eerie voices she can suddenly and inexplicably hear. Unfortunately for Bridget, the voices are demons—and Bridget possesses the rare ability to banish them back to whatever hell they came from. Literally.

Terrified to tell her friends or family about this new power, Bridget confides in San Francisco’s senior exorcist, Monsignor Renault. The monsignor enlists her help in increasingly dangerous cases of demonic possession, but just as she is starting to come to terms with her freakish new role, Bridget receives a startling message from one of the demons. And when one of her oldest friends is killed, Bridget realizes she’s in deeper than she ever thought possible. Now she must unlock the secret to the demons’ plan before someone else close to her winds up dead—or worse, the human vessel for a demon king.

My Review

First, I want to talk about the cover of Possess, I loved it. I’m not exactly sure why they have the tree branches going across the girl’s face. I’m not sure what purpose that serves but it does make it look creepy. I loved the cover. Moving on to the story itself, I want to say that I loved the book as a whole. Gretchen McNeil did a beautiful job in writing this book. I loved the characters especially Bridget. Though at times I wish she would have spoken up for herself. I understand that with a secret like Bridget’s that conversations are a little harder without coming out and saying what the secret is, so I thought that was all good for the character development. As the story progresses, I loved how as Bridget figured things out so did the reader. We went along being clueless with Bridget and we were learning things right along with her. I think that Gretchen did an awesome job with this book. The amount of research that she put into this book really shows through her writing. I absolutely loved this book. The ending was good. I liked that Matt and Bridget were able to stay together. Though I do hope that there will be a sequel of some kind with this novel, it seems like there could be one. I really enjoyed reading this book.