Image credit: (www.powells.com) Arthur, Artist. Manifest: A Mystyx Novel. New York: Kimani Press, 2010.
Does walking and talking with a beautiful young man who happens to be a ghost but who makes you laugh and listens to your secrets compose a relationship?
Manifest, the first in the Mystyx Series, introduces us to Krystal Bentley who struggles with her abilities as a ghost-whisperer. She is new to Lincoln, Connecticut, and is immediately pressed into service by the ghost of a high school boy who was killed the year before. A persistent boy. A boy who knows her name.
"Help me, Krystal".In this story, we get to know what's it's like to interact with the dead, be scared by the living, be badgered by both, and fall in love a little. We also get the picture of what it's like to be a girl in a clique filled high school whose parents have divorced and who's not sure what her place will be in this new 'burb. A suburb where the school cafeteria itself is like a suburban Tower of Babel where student's seem unable to understand one another or to communicate.
I open my eyes, not that I mean to, it just happens I guess. I look toward the window seat where all the stupid stuffed animals Janet thought would cheer me up are arrayed like a pastel-colored army.
I don't know what I'm looking for. Whatever it is, I hope I don't find it. But there he is- a black boy, kind of tall and skinny. He's wearing jeans, the baggy kind like all the guys in school wear, and a white T-shirt three sizes too big, hanging to his knees like a nightgown. His boots look new, Timberlands with the laces only halfway up, the huge tongue sticking out from the sagging denim hem of his jeans. He's wearing a watch on one wrist and a bracelet- I think it's silver- on the other. His hair is kind of curly on top, cut low on the sides with some lines or design or something.
I suppose he's kind of cute.
But he's kind of transparent.
Will Krystal be able to hone her skills to find out what really happened to Ricky? To make peace at home? And to find her place at Settlemans High? Read Manifest to find out how Krystal's new life turns out in the end.
