Catching You

Katie Gallagher

I previously received this book as part of a tour, but I could not rate it high enough to let the review be published while the tour was on. Please find my review of this 1-2 star book here.

I was drawn to ‘Catching You’ because it had hints that Lauren could see the dead after her boyfriend dies in a car accident. Paranormal plus YA = good, right? No, not in this case. Instead there was a wishy washy storyline that didn’t get me excited or even have me wondering what was going to happen. I had no empathy for the characters, and so I couldn’t have cared less if more of them were killed.

I started getting bad feelings about this novel from the beginning – too many description of people’s outfits in ways that didn’t work for me, as well as blow by blow descriptions of teeth brushing and the like.

The funeral, and the young characters reactions aren’t all that good. I felt like there should have been more there, both in term of emotions and also the reactions of the adults to Elizabeth’s pronouncements. I just didn’t have any feeling.

The dialogue left me feeling a bit sad. It’s ok to have contractions in speech! Sometimes it feels like the author has just gone right through with Word replace. Much more work to be done there.

Lauren’s responses to the text messages were a bit weird. It’s just think it was a wrong number, or try calling them or something. No big deal. It was totally unclear to me why this would be the case. Maybe it’s an American thing I’m missing?

I’m going to be generous and give it 2 stars. Or maybe not. I at least finished it, but I can’t decide if that was out of pity for the characters or some sort of odd martyrism.