Poor writing & uninteresting story. ( )

I really enjoyed it. ( )

This novel sounded fascinating; the main character could talk to ghosts, and one of them was The Mozart....what's not to love? So I grabbed the audiobook, and started listening.
Soon enough, I saw my mistake. This medium is supposed to be in her 30's, but she acts like a freaking child, and is angry ALL the time. She's whiny, and usually throwing fits about issues that normal adults usually ignore or get over. I wish she wouldn't agonize so much about being "normal", and enjoy her gift...! So much self pity, it's unreal. And this aversion to classical music? Wtf, seriously....? I'd love it. And, I find it very relaxing. It's odd that this woman cannot, for me.
The novel is full of clichés, like "the phone shrilled", every chapter. It's very predictable, simple, and chock full of characters that were obviously written in to further the very weak plot lines. The letters Edward, the pianist wrote, were simple to the point of sounding like a ten year old wrote them.
Also, the story fell well short of its potential. It's a real stinker. Cranky seems to be the new trend in light writing, and it's weird..... Who can possibly care for or love someone who is SO grumpy, all the time? She annoyed the hell out of me.
Whatever the author was going for, I just couldn't feel it. To make matters worse, the narrator, Kirsten Potter, sounded snide, or condescending most the time. Her accents were seriously atrocious...!! Her Russian was stereotypical, and her Mozart was abysmal. All others sounded the same.

I couldn't manage to get past the 20th chapter, and gladly gave up. Who can possibly have this much time to waste on something that annoys you SO much...? I don't. Ugh...!
1 star. ( )

I wanted to enjoy this novel by Julia Cameron (author of The Artist's Way) more than I was ultimately able to. But to be fair, it was probably actually better than I should have expected a new-agey romance novel about a medium falling in love with a pianist (with the help of a certain matchmaking dead composer) to be. The story is in some ways predictable and uninspired, and the characters are more obnoxious than sympathetic (particularly the main protagonist, Anna, but also including, most unfortunately, the titular ghost), but both story and characters did have their occasional moments, just often enough to keep me reading to the end.

To sum up: Not absolutely awful, but not great either.

http://www.amazon.com/review/R3R1YW95P545I2 ( )

I really wanted to like this a lot more than I did, and I honestly think I would have if the main character was even a fraction more likeable. The problem is that it's hard to root for a woman who spends 90% of the book being surly and/or insufferable.

The concept of a medium being haunted by a ghost is a good one, I enjoyed that she had a chip on her shoulder about being 'weird' and I thought her encounters with the various ghosts in it was interesting but her interactions with real people just made you want to shake her. Sometimes you read a book and you genuinely think 'why is that character alone?' but that wasn't an issue here and everytime she worried that her 'gift' would get in the way I just wanted to tell her that it wasn't her gift that caused her to be alone, just her crappy personality.

Her love interest (a red headed pianist called Edward - I can't be the only one's whose head went to [b:Twilight|41865|Twilight (Twilight, #1)|Stephenie Meyer|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1275613536s/41865.jpg|3212258]?) was a sweet guy, although he wasn't without his own flaws (flirting it up with her friend in front of her, not calling, generally being a bit of a doormat). Despite them though, I found him endearing but I was maybe biased as I find sensitive, musical, intense, shy men appealing.

I'd suggest giving the book a read - the scenes with Mozart's ghost are pretty fun (he has an interest in Anna helping Edward) and there are some good moments with some of the other secondary characters. The story is good, original and I would have rated it higher if I had liked Anna better as I do think it could have been more enjoyable. Most people might have a higher tolerance to that sort of character flaw than I do though. ;) ( )