Eli is a young man whose troubled older sister Celeste committed suicide by throwing herself off a lighthouse. Eli was unable to stop her, and when he got to her broken body and found her still alive, instead of staying with her as she asked, he ran for help. Since that time he has been seeing her ghost and concludes she wants him to join her by doing the same thing. This all takes place in the Lake Charles area of Louisiana, on an island familiarly called The Shacks.
Up in New Jersey a young woman named Maxine (Max) steals her recently-deceased father’s ashes from her stepmother and the funeral home and takes off for that same Louisiana lighthouse in order to climb it and spread the ashes. She and her father had once visited the place.
Luckily for both of them, in the grand scheme of things, Hurricane Celeste intervenes. They are thrown into quite the adventure as the weather derails their plans, and they enter a life-and-death struggle involving the elements as well as some unique characters trapped on the island.
This is a well-constructed novel and renders an interesting portrait of the author’s native territory. It has a satisfying conclusion, although the resolutions to the kids’ initial problems seem a TEENY BIT facile. But I quibble. Some of the action passages go on a bit long for my taste, but the book would make a heckuva movie.
A little bad language (mostly the word “damn”), no sex but a little romance, some violence.
Pretty good book.
Categories: Books We Recommend, Death and Grieving, Natural Disasters, Peer Relationships, Suicide, Supernatural/Occult, Violence
Before You Buy YA 
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