Graveyard Girls 1

This brand new middle grade supernatural series is set in the town of Misery Falls, where a hundred years ago a man with a wooden leg was bullied so much that he snapped and killed a teenage girl. Every year, the town comes together to celebrate the town and ward off his evil spirit. 

The Grim Sleepers are:

1) Whisper, who's on the cover there. She's a track star and an environmentalist. Her dad recently remarried and she's adjusting to having a snobby stepsister. I think she and her stepsnob each have a little brother, too, but I can't remember clearly. They weren't important. 

2) Gemma, the leader. She's the one who really believes in the supernatural because her mom and aunt run a new agey shop. 

3) Sophie, the smart one. Massive overachiever because she wants to outshine her perfect older sis. Has been silently flirting with the cute guitar-playing boy that has lessons at the same time as her piano lessons. Starts texting with him near the end of the book. 

4) Frannie, the actress. Playing Audrey in the school's performance of Little Shop of Horrors. Has big drama with Whisper's stepsnob's BFF. Miranda? I think her name was Miranda. They hate each other. Miranda put a tarantula on Frannie, who was so scared she wet her pants during show and tell, though Miranda's side is that she got Frannie into acting and then how dare she be better than Miranda. Yeah, seriously. 

So the girls are a little club that has sleepovers and tells scary stories, which they have to write themselves. It's been bad lately though because no one's come up with anything scary. Then they each get a text to meet in the graveyard. There are chapters from the PoV of "Silas Hoke," who's the old town murderer, and he's the one luring them there, but as the girls quickly learn, this is actually Zuzu. Zuzu is a model for her family's very popular fashion brand. She's also BFFs with Whisper's stepsnob and Frannie's nemesis. 

Zuzu however is really awesome. She wants to be a horror writer, so the Silas chapters were her basically getting into character. She's a cool fashionista but also a horror lover, so she's quite interesting. But she's also very frustrating because she wants to join the Grim Sleepers yet is afraid to tell her snob friends that she has other friends. And she never tells why exactly she's friends with these nasty bitches. All three of them liking fashion is no good reason. 

Once Zuzu joins them, she injects the horror love back into them and right there in the graveyard, Whisper tells the title story, which is about how people's thumbs develop tiny brains from phone overuse and detach themselves from their humans. Clearly inspired by her stepsnob. It's more gore and gross than scary. 

The girls then decide to sneak into the jail where Silas was executed and have some scary times. At the end, they also discover that his grave has been dug up. 

The book is divided into PoV chapters for each girl, which helped with characterization, although they mostly fell flat. Gemma doesn't have much character aside from wanting to be leader and being the one who's into the supernatural. Frannie likewise has her past trauma and her acting. You get a little more out of Whisper, but her Dawn Schafer moments ruin any good she does. Sophie is the most likeable of the main four, but her obsession with being better than her sister is annoying. As I said, Zuzu's a really awesome character and I want to see more from her. All of them have promise but suffer from flaws. Possibly because the book could have been a lot longer. But it's part of a 5-book series, presumably so each girl can tell a story, and hopefully the characterization grows in future volumes.