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Charlotte wants to be the ‘it’ girl at her school – but dying has totally killed her social life.

The other dead kids call her a ‘Choker’ – not only did a stray gummy bear in the trachea kill her, but when the pressure is on, Charlotte can’t handle it. It’s all too similar to her life before death – she was invisible, until the first day of the new school year. With her new look and hair, Charlotte tries to be visible – especially to Damen Dylan, the hottest guy in school - only one stupid gummy bear gums up the works, and now she’s dead.

What’s a dead girl to do? Charlotte quickly finds out that unlife has a lot of the same drags as life, like school. She’s forced to go to deadequette classes with a group of decaying stiffs who are just as clueless as she. And then there’s the small problem of her undying love for Damen. Charlotte may be dead, but her feelings aren’t.

But there’s help on the horizon, and from a completely unexpected source: Scarlet, the Freshman little sister of Petula, Hawthorn High’s queen bee (and Damen’s current girlfriend). But Scarlet is nothing like her big sis: where Petula is the classic beauty queen, Scarlet is a punked out, indie pop goth girl. It’s no wonder she’s the one who can see Charlotte for what she is – a ghost. The girls quickly figure out that they can do something the others can’t – switch places. Charlotte hops in Scarlet’s body to pursue Damen, while Scarlet drifts off in spectral form to pursue more gothly things. It gets the both of them in trouble – and closer to what they want.

So, can Charlotte become who she wants to be? Will Scarlet learn that there’s more to life than being difficult for difficulty’s sake? Will Petula the petulant get her come-uppance, and who will end up with the boy? Though the book answers all of these questions, it doesn’t explain why Charlotte and Scarlet have rhyming names, or why author Tonya Hurley thinks that all of her research can be done by watching MTV2 (Hurley mentions such ‘underground’ bands as Death Cab for Cutie, who reached number one on the Billboard list with their last album, and My Chemical Romance, whose second album went platinum with almost record speed).

The book is clearly aimed at the Hot Topic generation, with little care spent on things like description, tone, or even technicalities (there are more than a few grammatical errors in the book, and though there are less than, oh, say, Laurell K Hamilton’s books, there are more than any self-respecting author should have). In the first part of the book, Hurley lets pop culture do most of her descriptive work by referencing songs or movies. This trend ends, briefly, when Charlotte dies and the dead world is described, but unfortunately, Hurley falls off the creative wagon as the book drags on. And though most of the female characters spend a great deal of the book chasing after Damen, Hurley made one major mistake – she forgot to make the hero likable (or, really give him much of a personality of any kind).

This book falls into the all-too-easy trap of the teen market; because the target audience is younger, and therefore not to be expected to have refined literary needs, they just don’t have to try as hard. But what makes the teen market the monster that it is would be the crossover potential, as books like Twilight have proven. Teen literature is meant to be accessible to adult audiences as well as the younger generation, but Ghost Girl alienates the older readers as well as the younger ones with half a brain. This book isn’t even light fluff reading – it’s just bad.

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