Review- Dark Souls

Title: Dark Souls
Author: Paula Morris
Publisher: Point (Scholastic)
Find it here: Amazon, Goodreads
Source: ARC compliments of Scholastic

Welcome to York, England.

Mist lingers in the streets.

Narrow buildings cast long shadows.

This is the most haunted city in the world...

Miranda Tennant arrives is York with a terrible, tragic secret.  She is eager to lose herself amid the quaint cobblestones, hoping she won't run into the countless ghosts who supposedly roam the city..
.
Then she meets Nick, an intense, dark-eyed boy who knows all of York's hidden places and histories.  Miranda wonders if Nick is falling for her, but she is distracted by another boy--one even more handsome and mysterious than Nick.  He lies in the house across from Miranda and seems desperate to send her some sort of message.  Could this boy be one of York's haunted souls?

Soon, Miranda realizes that something dangerous--and deadly--is being planned.  And she may have to face the darkest part of herself in order to unravel the mystery--and find redemption.

My thoughts:

I really enjoyed this book because the premise of the story reminded me a lot of Harry Potter.  In Dark Souls, Miranda can see ghosts only after her best friend was killed in a car accident that Miranda was a part of as well.  She sees her best friends ghost walk out of her body, wave at her and then walk off into the after life.  After this incident she starts seeing ghosts almost all the time.  Since she has now seen and practically experienced death she now sees ghosts.  As in Harry Potter, once someone has witnessed death they are able to see the thestrals, the skeletal horse-like creatures who pull the horseless carriages from Hogsmeade to Hogwarts.

Another reason I liked this book because I love ghost stories and novels rich with history.  Many of the ghosts that were walking around the city had lived centuries before and were dressed in very old style clothing; some were orphans that had tragically died when the orphanage burned down in the late eighteen hundreds.  The historical aspects of the story that were my favorite.  I enjoy meeting new characters that have a mysterious past from a hundred or so years ago.  Especially the ghost in the window across the street from house.  I was so anxious just to find out who he was, how he died and why he was trying to contact Miranda! I just love things like that.

Dark Souls was incredibly fast paced as well! When a chapter ended I was always curious to know what happened next.  My only criticism of the book is that the cover and the synopsis make it seem a lot scarier than it actually is.  Maybe my tolerance of scary books is really high but I thought Dark Souls was a light read that I greatly enjoyed.