Title: Croak (Croak #1)
Author: Gina Damico
Published: March, 2012 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Thanks: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt via NetGalley
Pages: 311
Rating:  
Purchase: The Book Depository

Sixteen-year-old Lex Bartleby has sucker-punched her last classmate. Fed up with her punkish, wild behavior, her parents ship her off to upstate New York to live with her Uncle Mort for the summer, hoping that a few months of dirty farm work will whip her back into shape. But Uncle Mort’s true occupation is much dirtier than that of shoveling manure.

He’s a Grim Reaper. And he’s going to teach her the family business.

Final Thoughts:
This one ended up being surprisingly addictive. It wasn’t quite what I was expecting—something along the lines of a Dead Like Me clone—still, it turned out to be a little gem, just in a different way. Lex quickly progressed from her initial delinquent state featuring quite a lot of physical violence and a general defiance of reason into someone that seemed somewhat pliable. I enjoyed her antics in the beginning, but found it a relief that the book didn’t rely on her punching people for 300 pages. It goes off on a mystery solving tangent instead, backed by a town full of death and reaping, laced with plenty of humour, teen bonding—the occasion bout of underage drinking—and a mashup of board games.