Forbidden by Eve Bunting

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Eve Bunting - Forbidden
The blurb:Sixteen-year-old Josie Ferguson has just lost both her parents. She is sent to live with an unknown aunt and uncle in a town on the stormy northwest coast of Scotland. But the townspeople, including her relatives, are as cold and hostile as the sea.

Josie has never felt so alone.

Then Eli appears. Mysterious but kind—and handsome—he sparks a desire in Josie unlike anything she has ever experienced. Even though she’s been warned that Eli is forbidden, she can’t stop thinking about him.

And the locals are harboring a secret. When curious, determined Josie sets out to uncover it, the truth is more horrific than she could have imagined.

It’s a truth terrible enough to raise the spirits of the dead.

My rating: 3/5
Tagged: fantasy, historical fiction, romance, young adult
Date I started this book: 01/01/2016
Date I finished this book 03/01/2016

What did I think? There are ideas in Eve Bunting's "Forbidden" that I really liked. I selected it to read because it seemed the old fashioned ghostly romantic story where a young girl is sent off to a remote place to relatives she barely knows and there she meets a mysterious man. In this case, her name is Josie and the young man is Eli. The remote place is Brindle Point and the home is called Raven's Roost. Bunting has a nice touch in the writing that it isn't contemporary but it isn't wholly historical either and it lends to the surrealism of the story.

That said, the story didn't completely work for me in the end. I'm not really sure if it was the characters, the pacing (it was slower than I expected), that it was too short or that it became too predictable but it lost steam for me just as it should have picked up.