Vibes -- a review by George Morejon

Vibes

Amy Kathleen Ryan

*** stars

Vibes starts with the main character, Kristi, telling the reader that she's a fat, ugly, unpopular girl that no one likes, who happens to be able to read minds. Her life at home sucks. She hates her mom and her dad abandoned them both. Her school's a total joke, being described as something I would call a new-age hippie experiment gone who-knows-where. Anyway the classes are a joke. She hates the popular crowd, but still can't help being attracted to her ex-best friend's brother, Gusty. Her only friend is one of the school's most unpopular kids, Jacob Flax, a real nerd. Isn't high school grand?

Things are going as well as they ever will until a new kid named Mallory shows up. He's a pimply ginger kid who gives off a dangerous feeling mental vibe, but Kristi's able to really connect with him. Between the feelings with her and Mallory, the character assessment program she has to do with Gusty (thanks to Jacob), and her dad coming home after 2 years of absence, she's got a lot to handle.

This book had a somewhat slow start. It wasn't really that exciting at all in the beginning. Just about the only thing good about it was Kristi's personality around the first third of the book. She was a total jerk-loner type, but she was different from a lot of other stereotypes I would think of for teenage girls. She matures (if you would view the way she changes "maturing") a lot over the novel into almost a different person. Personally I didn't like the change she made, but that's just me. There's a lot of stuff I had to skip over though, so read the book to find out everything. Okay, not everything, since this book has quite a few loose ends to it, but on the plus side there were some unexpected turns in it. I'd say about average time to read, maybe 10 hours. A little slow.