Anora Silby can see the dead, and turn them into gold coins. After she gets kicked out of her old high school and been labeled as "crazy", she starts at a new school with the goal of keeping her secret and live out her life as a normal girl. It becomes hard when she is moved to a school that is far more than it seems, and keeping her secret is not just to keep a normal life, but to keep her life for herself at all.

I enjoyed this book! It definitely was YA and didn't delve too deep into anything. It definitely was an adventure and I really appreciated it. I am a sucker for ghosts, witches, and special powers in books anyways, and I have really liked the other books Scartlett St. Clair has released. I will definitely be following the rest of the series.

A girl who can see the dead finds herself dragged into a world of ghosts, shapeshifting warrior crows, a forbidden romance, and a murderer on the loose. Anora Silby can see the dead... and she can turn their spirits into gold coins. After a horrible incident in her old school her mother has moved her to a new one, far away from the incident in hopes for a new start. Anora keeps her abilities a secret but it’s kind of hard to remain calm when you see dead bodies and ghosts... and it doesn’t help that the new school she transferred to use to be an asylum and on the first day the ghost of a dead girl is following her. Anora wants nothing more than to be normal but when she accidentally claims the soul of a ghost of a dead girl on campus and turns her into a coin... only to lose the coin things go wrong. Turns out the coin gives otheres the ability to steal souls and when a classmate ends up dead, Anora knows it just has to be the coin. It doesn’t help that she doesn’t know who she can trust with her secrets and who is actually trying to use her. Throw in a handsome but mysterious boy named Shy, a girl who absolutely loathes her name Natalie, a sad boy who smokes and has ghosts of his own named Thane, and a new friend named Lennon... but who among them can she truly trust? Betrayals, romance, and friendship all come together as Anora must navigate who she truly is and what her abilities actually mean. Also she’ll have to decide if she can trust the one boy that she can’t seem to stay away from who seems so familiar to her despite them never having met. This is the first book in the series and I actually really liked it! I enjoyed the mystery and the magic system was fun, and the romance was a pretty sweet one, and thankfully there was no love triangle (gosh I was so worried there would be one haha). Overall, a great read and I can’t wait to see where the next book goes and what happens to Anora and Shy!

*Thanks Netgalley and SOURCEBOOKS Bloom Books, Bloom Books for sending me an arc in exchange for an honest review*

I wish I had read this before I read A Touch of Darkness because if I had I have a feeling I would have rated it higher. I really wanted to like everything about it because I love Scarlett St. Clair’s writing but it just wasn’t as well written as her other works. I think there are two reasons for that. One is that, even though I received an ARC of the updated 2022 version, it was her first published book and it shows. The story isn’t as fleshed out as it could be and it seems to need more world building. The second is that while her other books are adult, with adult content, this is very much a YA novel and I just don’t relate to those the way I used to because I am old now. But, the idea was good and I cared enough about what was happening by the middle of the book to actually want to find out what happens. Hopefully we will get the promised book 2 at some point so I can have some closure.

DNF, this was disappointing as I have read many other Scarlett St. Clair books that are notated as adult reads. There is a disclaimer on the first few pages of the pages within the book that would have depictions of suicide. We see the first depiction of that within the first two pages. I was not expecting it to hit me as hard as it did but I was sick to my stomach. Extremely disappointed, but I understand that not every book is going to be for everyone.