You’re Dead to Me, Reed Walker

Gr 9 Up–A supernatural mystery featuring two high school rivals. Tessa Sinclair has her whole life planned out down to the minute. What she doesn’t account for is waking up as a ghost after attending a graduation party. What’s worse is her school nemesis, Reed Walker, has also joined her in the afterlife. They soon realize their cause of death was not due to alcohol poisoning but instead something more malicious that also puts their friends and family in danger. The two must set aside their differences to keep their loved ones safe. This dual point-of-view story is billed as a rom-com, but any comedy is quickly overshadowed by the emotional journey that Tessa and Reed embark on as they come to terms with their deaths. Tessa and Reed were highly ­successful students with ambitious plans for their futures and now have to process the new reality. They see their family and friends grieve for them while they themselves are also grieving. Solving the mystery of their deaths gives Tessa and Reed some functional purpose in the novel, but the story’s resolution is less about figuring out how they died and more about accepting the fact that they did. Tessa reads white, Reed is Latine, and Tessa’s best friend is Black.