Book Review: Cheerage Fearage, by Kimberly Dana

Cheerage Fearage
Kimberly Dana

Tiki Tinklemeyer (love the name) is moving to a new town, and is being bustled off to cheer camp by her adoptive parents in order to meet new friends. This is bad news for Tiki, who is a be-speckled klutz who can't walk a straight line, and is more inclined to read books than spin cartwheels. And of course, the camp has a haunted past.

The premise was pretty good. The characters were well-thought, well-drawn, and pretty easy to imagine...and hear! We followed along with the mystery, trying to figure out who was behind the happenings...was it a ghost? Or human? There were no plot holes that tripped the reader.

I thought the cheerleader slang was a little over the top. I wouldn't be able to have more than a 5 minute conversation with any of the girls...except maybe Tiki. Though some of the slang was creative and quite clever, I would have preferred to have it toned down and mixed with a little normal kid-speak.

I didn't buy that Tiki, who couldn't walk a straight line on day one of camp, was one of the best tumblers by day 5. That seemed a stretch to me, unless Tiki has some kind of super power that we weren't made aware of!

The voice of the parents bothered me a bit...I believe they were meant to be portrayed as highly intelligent, but it came off sounding like two people *trying* to sound highly intelligent.

For me, the story ended abruptly with an epilogue that hinted at a supernatural angle. This is fine, except it wasn't set up properly in the story, so it seemed to come out of the blue. I literally looked at that last page and said, "What the hell was that?" The story played out as a pure mystery, except for the one or 2 hints of the supernatural; however, the supernatural story-line was never fleshed out. In fact, the epilogue seemed attached to the wrong story. It's voice was even different, as though the event that ended the story abruptly was a life-changing event for Tiki...except we never got to *see* it. The reader is left with no clue as to what happened.

I get the feeling that a lot of the unanswered questions are meant to be addressed in book 2, but I would prefer to have a story stand on its own merit, and not rely on sequels to finish it.

Overall, an okay read for me, but is worth checking out. You can get your Ecopy of Cheerage Fearage on Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Cheerage-Fearage-ebook/dp/B007OZH5XO/ref=ntt_at_ep_dpt_2