Audiobook Review: Yellow by Megan Jacobson

Yellow by Megan Jacobson
Publisher: Audible Studios
Release Date: February 1, 2016
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Publisher’s Description:

If 14-year-old Kirra is having a mid-life crisis now, then it doesn’t bode well for her life expectancy. Her so-called friends bully her, whatever semblance of a mother she had has been drowned at the bottom of a gin bottle ever since her dad left them for another woman, and now a teenage ghost is speaking to her through a broken phone booth.

Kirra and the ghost make a pact. She’ll prove who murdered him almost 20 years ago if he does three things for her. He makes her popular, he gets her parents back together, and he doesn’t haunt her. Things aren’t so simple however, and Kirra realises that people can be haunted in more ways than one.

Yellow is a young adult novel about Kirra, a fourteen year-old girl who lives in a small town in Australia. She takes care of her barely functioning alcoholic mother. Her dad left and is expecting a baby with his new girlfriend. He seems to care more about surfing than anything else. Even worse, Kirra lives in the Housing Commission section of town – where the poor kids live. She’s in the popular clique at school but is the lowest girl on the totem pole and her role in the group seems to be an object for the other girls’ bullying. They are downright mean, as only fourteen year-old girls can be.

Kirra finally reaches her breaking point, runs out of school and ends up on the beach. The phone in a nearby abandoned phone box starts ringing so she answers it. The ghost of a fourteen year-old boy named Boogie is on the other line. She is freaked out at first but then forms a friendship with him and agrees to find his murderer in exchange for him giving her advice on how to deal with the mean girls.

When listing to this book, at first I wondered why the author included the magical realism of Boogie’s character in the plot. Why wasn’t it just a straightforward book about surviving high school? It turns out that Boogie gives the story some wonderful twists that I won’t give away. And Jacobson’s prose is so beautiful it’s unlike anything I’ve read or listened to in a young adult novel. Finally, I liked that the book’s narrator had an Australian accent. The book is set in Australia and hearing it read with that accent made it that much easier for me to lose myself in the story. This is a book that both teenagers and adults can enjoy.

(I received a complementary copy of this audio book for review.)