You can always sign me up for some YA horror especially if it's got some spooky vibes going on the whole time.  Some blurbs have said this is like American Horror Story meets There’s Someone Inside Your House and I can absolutely see that!  It had me on the edge of my seat and I just found myself totally drawn into this world and the characters.  The vibes and the aesthetic going on here are so good!  I did not know for sure what was going to happen when I started this.  Based on the title, I obviously expected a good ghost story.  But what I got was so much more!  Check this one out!

Daffodil Franklin is spending the summer before she starts college running from her problems and housesitting a house that may or may not be hunted. From the beginning to the end, it is almost as if we’re sitting on a conversation with Daffodil, and the storytelling style really gave me The Twisted One Vibes. There are a few spooky moments, but this one overall did not win me over. Still, I enjoyed the unique tale and the upbeat ending. Thanks to HarperTeen and NetGalley for the ARC!

Thank you NetGalley and the publishers for this ARC.
This IS a ghost story! Just not the sort we have come to expect. Daffodil needs money to pay for college and gets a seemingly sweet deal to housesit a mansion for an elderly couple. Creepy and unexpected occurrences follow.  I would recommend to teens looking for a light but creepy tale.

Scheduled to post 2/2/21.

Where did I stop? 21% in

Why? So this is compared to Madeleine Roux and Danielle Vega. From what I read, it's nothing like those two authors that I've read of theirs. I feel like the story being pitched to me in the blurb is a completely different story than what I was getting between the pages. The cavalier attitude of the MC just entirely dissolved anything scary or creepy attempting to build in the story. The voice itself was just really hard for me to get behind. I pretty much hated the way it came across. It took a minute for anything even remotely creepy to start coming into play, and I was trying to hold out to see if the voice would change at all, but it didn't. It just watered down the entire story and I couldn't stand to read anymore of it

This Is Not a Ghost Story is a book that desperately wants to make sure the reader never knows what's going on. For the most part, this is fine - it is essentially a haunted house story, and feeling off-kilter is definitely part of the atmosphere overall. However, the further into the story we get, the more it starts to feel like a betrayal when the story veers wildly from the rails we thought we were on. Daffodil, our protagonist, is staying the summer in an old, giant house where weird things happen. This in itself is a solid premise: the house is clearly haunted in some way, and Daffodil's exploration of the house's history and revealing of the haunt would have been a satisfying journey. Portes wants to dig into deeper meat, which is also fine; ghosts have a long history of being used as metaphor. Where I started to have a problem was in the endgame, when a plot twist meant to make you rethink the book you just read just served to make me feel like I had been lied to.

A strange story with a lackluster resolution. I was hopeful for more details as to the nightmare world Daffodil was living in.

First, let me say that this plot is more unsettling than truly frightening. The tone is one of wrongness rather than fear. The set-up is standard horror fare - a teen on her own for the first time, running from her past, spending the summer alone in an isolated mansion. It should come as no surprise that practically as soon as the homeowner leaves weird things start to happen, things that suggest a haunting or a curse, especially once we learn that the house was the site of a tragedy. There is a point about halfway through the novel where there were enough questions, enough possibilities, that I was really into the book. It was only when Portes really committed to the truth of the events, when things took a particularly strange turn, that I began to be less invested. Events stopped making sense. I found them less unsettling and more tiresome. It's certainly a unique approach to the plot but it simply did not land with me.

While I'm sure this book will find a large audience, it wasn't the right fit for me. 

It's written from the POV of our seventeen year old protagonist Daffodil, who speaks to the reader and tells her story. There's an authenticity to her voice as she sometimes rambles, sometimes fumbles, sometimes repeats herself. While that is realistic to the character, it's a tad overwhelming at times as a reader who doesn't naturally gravitate toward fiction written for younger audiences. Although, I do believe teenager horror fans would find this type of voice entertaining and relatable. 

The plot is a little hard to talk about without giving anything away. At first, I wasn't sure where it was leading me. I didn't get a clear picture until about 2/3rds into the story, and it made for a fun twist. The flip side to this- it took 2/3rds of the book for me to really get invested, and while the ending had a enjoyable unexpectedness to it, there was a large part that left me disappointed. 

Overall, this wasn't for me, but I do think a younger audience would enjoy.

This is Not a Ghost Story by Andrea Portes is the tale of a 17 year old girl named Daffodil Turner. She is leaving behind her old life in Nebraska to start her freshman year at Bryn Mawr College. Before she starts college, she decides to take a job house sitting for a professor in an old home in Scarlet Mills, Pennsylvania. She is tasked with watching the house and helping oversee a guesthouse which is under construction. Her closest neighbor is an eccentric older British woman names Penelope Persephone Crisp. 
The story is told through Daffodil’s voice and she is clearly a bright and funny girl. She describes herself as a bit eccentric herself and enjoys watching videos of conspiracy theories and listening to podcasts. As she details her experience in the house, she also tells a little bit about her past and her involvement with a boy named Zander Haaf, but there are parts that she doesn’t want to remember about him. After she moves in, there are some strange events that take place, but Daffodil doesn’t believe that she may be living in a house that could be haunted. Is she living in a haunted house, is she haunted by her past, or is there a perfectly rational explanation for what she is experiencing?
I absolutely loved this story. I really liked Daffodil and I loved being inside her head.  I enjoyed learning about her and getting her perspective on what was happening in the house. She has social anxiety disorder and I feel that Portes did an excellent job with portraying a character who lives with this every day and how it impacts her life. I definitely recommend this book!

Daffodil Franklin just graduated high school and needs a job to earn enough for room/board so she can attend Bryn Mawr College and get out of Nebraska. She is on the train on her way to school when she happens to get off in Scarlet Mills, Pennsylvania. She starts knocking on doors, inquiring about jobs and finds one housesitting for a wealthy couple who live on the outskirts of town. Once she starts the job, weird things start happening in the house. She starts hearing noises outside, like animals scratching and then a pot she had boiling on the stove just moved to the middle of the kitchen floor. She doesn’t know about the house’s history and any rumors about the house either. 

So this was a really interesting and fast read. It was in first person, actually Daffodil was talking directly to the reader trying to convince them that what they are reading was real and actually happened which was a super interesting approach that I have never read before. For me it did get a little distracting and hard to follow since she was unraveling during the latter part of the book which was the point but I still found it hard to figure out what was going on. I did eventually figure it out. It was an interesting concept and with an ending I never saw coming. 

Thanks to Harper Teen and Netgalley for the complimentary copy of this book in e-book form. All opinions in this review are my own.

Did I like This is Not a Ghost Story? I honestly don’t know how I feel.
It took until about halfway through the book for it to hit its stride. That’s when it started to be hard to put down. You still have absolutely no idea what’s going on in the story, but it picks up the pace. The short chapters made it easy to keep reading just one more for the night, and before I knew it, the book was done.
I’m undecided if I like the style of the book. Daffodil, the narrator, talks directly to the reader, and there are a lot of asides, parentheses, offbeat jokes. On the one hand, it makes the story feel more immediate and creates a closer connection to Daffodil. On the other, it was a bit much at times. There was sometimes very little content, and it could be repetitive.
I’ll give it this; now I want to make people read it just to see what they think of it.

A delightfully twisty read, THIS IS NOT A GHOST STORY is a wonderful story in the under-served YA horror market. Darkly funny and terrifying by turns, Portes' writing is a joy and I look forward to reading more of her work.

*I received an ARC from NetGalley for my honest opinion of this book*

Daffodil sees a house, covered in daffodils. Someone answers, and they offer her a job that she so desperately needs. She so desperately needs this job, so she can afford her first semester of college. How could this situation be any more perfect? 

Or is it?

Of course the title is "This is Not a Ghost Story" but this book wastes no time sucking you in and getting WEIRD. As if spending your summer in a countryside mansion, alone, being paid to house sit and oversee the guest house being built in the back of the house is anywhere near normal, but it's money, right?

I really enjoyed this book. The narration and commentary was so relatable, often times funny! The main character, Daffodil, was witty and likeable. She often spoke her mind with the exact thoughts I think a lot of us have had. As funny as it could get, though, it had plenty of the creep factor that you'd expect in a ghost story, without being a ghost story. Or is it? There were times I was reading this book and I thought to myself "What in the world is going on here?" This is definitely not one to miss. If you're thinking of picking it up, do it!

Warning- set time aside to read this once you start it and actually the less you know about this book the more you will enjoy it (funny to say as I'm writing this review). Let's just say  I saw a  prior comment about this book  that while not an exact spoiler, still gave something away and I wish I hadn't saw it. 

Daffodil isn't likable but that totally works. Although predictable I still enjoyed this book. Don't let the YA aspect of the book fool you -it still has a bit of an eerie factor for adults too.

I read it really quickly, which is probably the only reason I did read it.  I don't even know what to say.  I kind of felt like I needed to be on something to appreciate the book.  I don't really think there was an actual point to this book.  It was just a bunch of words jumbled together.

I am always looking for good horror novels, and this one did not disappoint. It is a nice, slow building, almost gothic horror feel story of Daffodil and the summer before her freshman year in college, housesitting for strangers. As we witness strange things begin to happen around Daffodil, we are also learning small parts of her past. There were many times that I thought that I knew what was going on in the story, only to have a new creepy window open.

I thought this was a good book. Well-written. I loved the story itself. It was really interesting and a fun read.

Portes has written a unique, eerie, and bittersweet tale of Gothic suspense as well as melancholy, and boy does it work. Our narrator, Daffodil, has a stream of consciousness tone that, though hard to settle into at first, makes for an endearing and unintentionally unreliable voice. As she settles into the house she is housesitting, her need to cling to skepticism downplays the strange things happening, which in turn makes it all the more creepy. As we start to learn more about Daffodil's background and what led her to take this position, we get a well drawn out and heartbreaking portrait of trauma and loss, and I ended up really liking her. In terms of scary, there are definitely creepy elements to this story, and seen through Daffodil's eyes we get to experience the panic first hand. But there is also a tender and sad undercurrent to this story, just like there can be with many ghost stories, and it only enhanced the narrative as it went on. 

THIS IS NOT A GHOST STORY is quiet and creepy, but also quietly sad and tender. It wasn't what I expected, in all the best ways possible.

This definitely ended up being a lot sweeter than I expected! The writing style has a stream of consciousness to it, but I didn't mind it in this particular story, as the author gave it almost a noir feel. While I wish the story had been a bit longer and more developed, I also see why Portes chose to keep the narrative tight and streamlined. If you've read a story with this particular twist at the ending, you'll probably see it coming like I did, but I still appreciate what the author did by taking a scary story and giving it a heart of gold.

When I first requested This Is Not a Ghost Story on Netgalley, I wasn’t aware that it was a YA novel. I only read the blurb and it sounded creepy enough for me. That being said, I’m definitely not the targeted age group this book. I did read it regardless, but I found little to enjoy.

For one, the protagonist, Daffodil, is trying way too hard to be witty. No one would tell a story like that, especially not a 17 year old girl all on her own. It just didn’t work for me.

It also wasn’t very creepy, which I get it’s YA, but I found very little horror elements in all. Thinking back to what I read at 15 years old, for example, I doubt I would’ve found this creepy or suspenseful. The pacing of the book was also a bit odd,  and felt jumbled in some places. I’m not sure if that was intended or not. 

It ended up being a love story more than anything, so I’m not sure why the blurb mentions American Horror Story (which is one of my favorite shows). I did appreciate the ending even if it was a bit abrupt. It was definitely a good twist. 

Thank you for this review copy Netgalley and HarperTeen.