Review of Possess

My review of Possess by Gretchen McNeil is based on an ARC of the book that I received. The following review is my honest opinion of the work.

Goodreads Summary: "Fifteen-year-old Bridget Liu just wants to be left alone: by her mom, by the cute son of a local police sergeant, and by the eerie voices she can suddenly and inexplicably hear. Unfortunately for Bridget, it turns out the voices are demons – and Bridget has the rare ability to banish them back to whatever hell they came from.

Terrified to tell people about her new power, Bridget confides in a local priest who enlists her help in increasingly dangerous cases of demonic possession. But just as she is starting to come to terms with her new power, Bridget receives a startling message from one of the demons. Now Bridget must unlock the secret to the demons' plan before someone close to her winds up dead – or worse, the human vessel of a demon king."

First off I lack the word to communicate how much I love this cover. It's so gorgeous and eerie and just plain captivating. It fits the book perfectly. I had sharp stabs of cover lust the second that I saw it which resulted in it immediately being added to my wish list.

When it comes to having a heroine lose one of her parents typically it's the mother that has passed away. I can understand why this is the obvious selection as a girl needs her mother but not many authors confront the other side of the issue, what it does to a girl to lose her Dad which is what I went through when I was twelve years old. Because Bridget and I had this in common I was able to relate to her on a really in depth level. Of course it also helped that she was insanely sarcastic much like me.

Possess was the first book I had ever read about demonic possession. The reason why is I'm not much for scary things and I avoid horror films like nobody's business [much to my boyfriend's disappointment]. Exorcism was high up on the list of things for me to avoid. But in the past year or so I decided that I wanted to try branching out. Since it was a YA book Possess seemed like a good choice. Why? Because for some reason my brain equated a book about exorcism for young adults to be less terrifying than one for adults. [Note to readers, my brain's logic SUCKS]. Possess did seriously creep me out at points and I figured out fairly early on [read this as I only did it once before realizing it was a bad idea] that it wasn't good bedtime reading.

This book may start out slow but it gets intense fast. I'm giving Possess by Gretchen McNeil a five out of five stars review. This was an amazing read. And for those of you with a deep fear of dolls? You might just want to have a snuggle partner close by to chase away those fears. Don't say I didn't warn you. ;o