i am sneaking this one in in the middle of my readventurer challenge - shhhh... 
 wow, i seem to be on a roll with reading sweet sweet books lately. and i don't mean this to be disparaging, but this book is truly a sweetie-pie almost-love-story. 
 and at first, i wasn't into it, i must confess. blame my need for the darkness and the edginess, but this one was so fast-paced, and was reading like the younger-range of YA, and i kept peering at it, trying to make out some of the bitchiness from fury. my bad. 
 this is not fury. this is its own thing. and it is a good thing. 
 shirley marr has created a great character in amy - her best friend rebecca is the siren, the untouchable, calculatedly aloof and apart, fostering her own image of being cooler-than-you, making all the boys fall for her and all the girls jealous. except amy. amy knows she is not in the same league as rebecca, and she doesn't really want to be. she doesn't care about boys, or clothes, or trends, she is busy just being who she is, dealing with the indifference of her father after her parent's divorce, and her mother's encyclopediac knowledge of chinese superstitions; mostly involving ghosts, helping out in her mother's vintage rummage store, and dealing with being stuck at that age where you want to be a kid but also recognize that your mother's eccentricities are not helping out the finances so hot, so you gotta step up. holy run-on sentence. sorry, kids! 
 so, when she accidentally releases a ghost from a locket intended for rebecca, and finds herself in the middle of a mystery involving star-crossed lovers, reincarnation, and a whole lot of 80's pop culture and slang, she is more comfortable than your average teenager with the idea of a ghost suddenly popping into her life. and she starts to understand what all those 80's crush movies are talking about. 
 it is a great personal-journey book.amy starts off as a pretty emotionally closed-off, independent character, not judging herself based on her appearance, or trying too hard to make friends other than rebecca, but the reality of the independent character is that it is a lonely road. having a crush on a ghost really only makes the loneliness more apparant. but her realization of this, and her blossoming into a more solid amy are fantastic, and it is hard not to fall in love with her, especially when all the backdrop is feel-good 80's pop music that makes you automatically root for the girl in glasses. 
 nothing like fury at all, but unlike that one, you will feel pretty good when you finish it, full of the flowering of possibilities. 
 quick, though - what is a cheesymite scroll??? i GIS'd it, and i got this: 
 and i am told it is filled with cheese and vegemite?? and amy eats this with strawberry milk?? i have survived eaten vegemite, and i suppose it is one of those acquired tsastes, but i cannot even picture eating vegemite with cheese, let alone the deliciously cloying hyper-sweetness of strawberry milk. but maybe it is an australian delicacy...but a note on the food in this book - holy cow, i gotta get me to australia. popcorn with icing sugar? yes, please, even though i don't know what the heck icing sugar is. but i know i want it. 
 and i also want someone to call me miss matey someday. 
 if i thought i could exist in the heat of that place, i would be there already. but there's no way. i wouldn't even make it one step out of the plane before i would erupt into a fireball, without even getting to taste icing sugar. sad. 
 at least i will have the books. and these amazing candy bars shirley sent me. 
 thank you, wonderful ladyface!