Tombstone Tea by Joanne Dahme

In order to be accepted by the “in crowd” at her new high school, Jessie accepts a dare to spend one night in a local cemetery collecting rubbings from ten gravestones. Once inside the gate of the dark and frightening burial ground, Jessie meets Paul, a handsome boy who works as a caretaker at the cemetery. Paul explains to Jessie about Tombstone Tea: a fund-raising performance in which actors impersonate the people buried in the cemetery. The actors are supposedly rehearsing on this particular evening, but Jessi quickly discovers that they aren’t actors at all but the ghosts of men and women buried in the cemetery. When one woman decides to adopt Jessie to replace her lost daughter, our heroine fears she may never escape the cemetery. - book jacket

*****

I’m not quite sure I liked Tombstone Tea very much. It is suspenseful and mysterious, but I couldn’t help but feel creeped out about Paul and Jessie being able to talk to dead people or that they liked cemeteries. What was even weirder was that one of the ghosts is just insane.

I understand that Dahme is trying to incorporate history into her book, but you don’t have to talk to “ghosts” to learn about or respect history and you sure don’t have to go to cemeteries!

Tombstone Tea takes on two different dialogues: Jessie’s (present day) and Paul’s (early 20th century). Jessie’s side of the story was okay with me, but Paul’s was confusing and eerie. I mean, he use to do seances and worked as a grave digger. What a life right? Then there is this one ghost who is just downright evil and that really turned me off. I like ghost stories, but this one just went too deap into the world of the "supernatural", spirits, and death.

Although Tombstone Tea is written extremely smoothly and has well developed characters, I'm not sure every teen would enjoy such a dark story. I mean is it really enjoyable to read about stuff like that?

Dahme is a good writer however, and I want to read her historical fiction novel, The Plague; but I still think that Dahme could do better with history and not supernatural stories.

Overall, I wouldn’t recommend Tombstone Tea (unless you absolutely love strange graveyard stories). There are plenty of other "creepy" books out there that are much more fun to read.

|Pages: 223|Year Published: Sept. 2009|Publisher: Running Press|

|Genre: Ghost stories, paranormal fiction, suspense|

|Age Group: YA, ages 13+|Content: supernatural themes|

|Enjoyed It: 2/5|Content Rating: 3/5|Cover: 4/5|

|Overall|