Book Review: Shift

TITLE: Shift
Book 2 in the Shade series
AUTHOR: Jeri Smith-Ready
PUBLISHED: 2011
CATEGORY: Young adult
GENRE: Paranormal, mystery, romance
PREMISE: Aura deals with her complicated romantic life while trying to discover what her and Zachary's birth have to do with the Shift.
MY REVIEW: Okay I admit to loving the first book in this series a lot when it came out last year. Aura was sassy, she was proactive, the love triangle actually made sense and I got how she could be torn between them, and the world building was really interesting. Also ghosts! No one writes about ghosts anymore it seems. So you can understand why I was rather pumped for the second book this year.
Now I'm not saying I was hugely disappointed because this is still a rather good book and I still greatly enjoyed it, but I will say I didn't love it as much as I loved the first book. Part of my issue is the whole ghosts coming to life thing. I've never been a fan of that scenario and while the author did try her darnest to have it make sense a large part of me was still like "really?"
My other issue was Zack and Aura in this book. The way they went about things in this book romantic wise was a overdramatic mess that made me roll my eyes a lot with the melodrama. Granted, still better then half the love triangles out there because at least I understand motivations here and Logan/Aura's relationship is one of the sweeter ones in YA lately (and I dare you not to sniff at what Logan eventually does in the end) but really the romantic shenanigans were vaguely annoying and to me it dragged down the plot a lot.
Still like this series and the author and really looking forward to Shine because the author did leave some very interesting stuff here. Just saying...not as fun and as likeable as the first.
WHO SHOULD READ: fans of the first book, paranormal fans, Mediator fans, ghost fans
RATING: Four out of Five red dresses for a good read that maybe wasn't as good as the first book.