From Goodreads: Velveteen Monroe is dead. At 16, she was kidnapped and murdered by a madman named Bonesaw. But that’s not the problem.

The problem is she landed in purgatory. And while it’s not a fiery inferno, it’s certainly no heaven. It’s gray, ashen, and crumbling more and more by the day, and everyone has a job to do. Which doesn’t leave Velveteen much time to do anything about what’s really on her mind.

Bonesaw.

Velveteen aches to deliver the bloody punishment her killer deserves. And she’s figured out just how to do it. She’ll haunt him for the rest of his days.

It’ll be brutal… and awesome.

But crossing the divide between the living and the dead has devastating consequences. Velveteen’s obsessive haunting cracks the foundations of purgatory and jeopardizes her very soul. A risk she’s willing to take—except fate has just given her reason to stick around: an unreasonably hot and completely off-limits coworker.

Velveteen can’t help herself when it comes to breaking rules… or getting revenge. And she just might be angry enough to take everyone down with her.

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I had a very hard time getting into this novel.  I loved the synopsis and the cover, so I was really looking forward to reading this one, but in the end, it just wasn’t what I was expecting.  I really wanted to learn about Bonesaw, and I figured that a majority of the novel would deal with Velvet’s terrible death and her attempt to bring Bonesaw down.  What I found, instead, is that the novel touches briefly upon Bonesaw here and there, but more often than not, deals with Velvet’s sexual frustrations alongside her life as a salvager in purgatory, which, in my opinion, ended up sounding very much like life in middle school.

I really didn’t care for the way the characters talked to each other.  Kipper and Quentin drove me insane with their commentary and, as far as I’m concerned, sitting around talking about conquests and calling each other sluts didn’t make any of the characters very endearing.  While I realize they are “young,” I expected that they would have grown up a bit seeing as some of them have actually been dead for a very long time.  Perhaps it was just me, but I really thought the characters would be a bit more mature than they turned out to be, especially as they get upset when others refer to them as young or as children.  Likewise, the characters didn’t really talk about anything substantial that I cared about, and so I had a very hard time connecting to them.

While Velvet was very self absorbed, her obsession with Nick and his obsession with sex was just weird.  Nearly every time Velvet sees him or interacts with him, all she can think about is how hot and sexy he is.  In turn, all he can think about is how much he wants to be with her, even though he thinks she’s a jerk, and even 40% into the novel I still didn’t feel like any substantial information was given to spur the reader on.  I was dying to hear about Velvet’s death and Bonesaw’s murderous tendencies, but as I said, that was much too few and far between.

Something else I struggled with throughout the novel was the peppering of SAT words.  Velvet and her friends would be talking about something mundane and suddenly an SAT word would pop up where, I felt, it didn’t really belong. Generally, the words showed up in the narration and not the dialogue, and don’t get me wrong, I love the use of the words and I hope it helps teens learn them, but I don’t necessarily feel that the words fit in with the story all that well.  Childish, immature actions don’t really mesh well with high end SAT words, in my opinion, so that threw me off a little bit.

Overall, I have to say I was disappointed in this novel.  It had a very high potential, but wasn’t what I was expecting in the least.  Had I known ahead of time that Bonesaw wouldn’t be the main issue and that purgatory was much like middle school, I may have liked the novel better than I did.  As it is, however, I really didn’t care for this novel.  One and a half stars.

Random House Children’s Books and Delacorte BFYR have both been extremely gracious in allowing me to read an ARC of this novel, via Netgalley, prior to its release on October 9, 2012.