Title: Croak Series: Croak #1
Author: Gina Damico
Published: March 20, 2012
Genre(s): Paranormal
Page Count: 311
Rating:
Summary from Goodreads:Fed up with her wild behavior, sixteen-year-old Lex's parents ship her off to upstate New York to live with her Uncle Mort for the summer, hoping that a few months of dirty farm work will whip her back into shape.
But Uncle Mort's true occupation is much dirtier than shoveling manure. He's a Grim Reaper. And he's going to teach Lex the family business.
She quickly assimilates into the peculiar world of Croak, a town populated by reapers who deliver souls from this life to the next. But Lex can't stop her desire for justice — or is it vengeance? — whenever she encounters a murder victim, craving to stop the attackers before they can strike again.
Will she ditch Croak and go rogue with her reaper skills?
It’s not that Croak was bad so much that is was just…nothing special. It certainly had its moments, of course, but I finished Gina Damico’s debut feeling rather unenthused. There weren’t any real surprises is in this book, and the prose was only so-so. Basically, this book is simply okay.
I really felt like a lot of this book was pretty standard. Unique teen girl, superpowers, some monologuing bad dude trying to ruin everything, and then it turns out the protagonist has the most special of all the special powers. Yawn. The grim reaper aspect might be new, but nothing else about Croak is. Damico just runs over oft-written plot threads and hopes that a snarky narrative style will make it all work. But it doesn’t.
Nothing about this book really jumped out to me; it’s completely forgettable and not emotionally arresting. Beyond her outer layer of sarcasm and “bad girl” vibes, there really didn’t seem to be much substance to Lex. I wouldn’t go so far as to say she’s a flat character, but neither did she have the nuance of reality. Likewise, her family situation stretched my limits of believability to their limit, and Lex’s assorted new friends in the town of Croak were tagged quite well, but not given much depth beyond that. I felt that it was shoddy work.
The plot of Croak is slightly dull as well. Like the rest of the book, it’s all very standard, going towards a direction that’s easy to discern for any reader who has even the slightest experience with fiction of the YA paranormal variety. The final confrontation with the Big Bad was singularly stale, I felt.
Overall, this was a very uninspired read for me. I didn’t get much out of it, and though it was enjoyable in some spots, I didn’t finish with any warm and fuzzy feelings towards Croak, and neither did I have much of a desire to continue on with the next two installments. Unfortunately, this book was more of a miss for me than anything else.
