For the most part, the ghosts in the story aren’t demonized. Edwards takes the road less traveled here, and instead of offering her readers the world of decomposition and immutable rage expected from a ghost story, she gives us a world of people-people who happen to be dead. Perhaps the most impressive aspect of this book is the way it approaches death. But I’m not Edwards’ real audience this is her first young adult novel, and I think those readers will empathize with Marvin’s fierce desire to find his own way. His backstory and eventual willingness to help Stella, even if that change of heart is selfishly motivated, is what kept me rooting for him and what earned him my approval by the novel’s end. He’s a teenager whose father recently died, whose mother remarried, and whose inheritance is the ability to see dead people. To be fair, his misanthropic disposition isn’t baseless he’s had a rough life.

Marvin is one of those protagonists you eventually grow to tolerate because the majority of the story is about him. Stella’s only hope at peace requires the two to face the world of the dead in all of its mysterious, horrifying, and supernatural glory, and the risks are great in this tale, some outcomes are worse than death. It’s in his effort to help Stella retrieve her memory and cross into the light that the real adventure begins. That touches his hardened heart, and, more likely, he realizes his only shot at ever having a girlfriend is if he pursues a dead one. The poor girl doesn’t realize she’s dead, remember anything further back than a few days, or know her actual name-she gets Stella from the label sewn into her pants. He actually puts his headphones in his ears so they don’t bother him.īut then he meets Stella McCartney, a teenage ghost-girl, hanging out in the cemetery behind his house. Night Shyamalan-y, but unlike cute and terrified “I-see-dead-people” Cole, Marvin is not only unafraid of ghosts, but he is just downright mean to them. Marvin disparages his ability and chooses to ignore every spirit who needs him to help them take care of unfinished business. Marvin has the psychic ability to see ghosts, a gift (or… curse rather) he inherits from his deceased father whose amicable specter is the very first the reader is introduced to.

Seventeen-year old Marvin resents his stepfather, struggles to communicate with his mother, cannot hold a coherent conversation with a female, and is indefatigably determined to do exactly the opposite of his father. This story is about a pretty typical teenage boy.

Marvin's Curse by Debra J. Edwards