After a particularly harsh day, Kirra hits the deserted unpopular beach only to find an abandoned telephone box ringing. Nicknamed yellow because of the unusual shade of her eyes, she is constantly taunted by the unforgiving world of teenager girls in high school. Yellow is about Kirra, a 14 year old teenager who lives on the wrong side of the hill near South Beach, a small costal town near Mount Warning and not too far from Bryron Bay in Australia. In that hour I was outraged and texted Amy from Lost In A Good Book (because I knew she’d read it and loved it) like crazy … weeks later I still don’t have enough words to sum up this book!

In fact I started reading it while waiting for my younger sister’s drama class to finish. Not going to lie, I went into this book with no expectations and the 90s world Jacobson writes about smacked me in the face with all the subtle etiquette of a freight train. I can’t thank Penguin enough for bringing this book to my attention, or Jacobson for writing such a gut wrenching book. I picked up this book because I was heading to Penguin Teen Australia’s #YASquad 2016 event in Sydney and Megan Jacobson was one of the four Aussie authors speaking. Things aren’t so simple however, and Kirra realises that people can be haunted in more ways than one. He makes her popular, he gets her parents back together, and he doesn’t haunt her.

She’ll prove who murdered him almost twenty years ago if he does three things for her. Her so-called friends bully her, whatever semblance of a mother she had has been drowned at the bottom of a gin bottle ever since her dad left them for another woman, and now a teenage ghost is speaking to her through a broken phone booth.

If fourteen-year-old Kirra is having a mid-life crisis now, then it doesn’t bode well for her life expectancy.

Yellow by megan jacobson