Possess by Gretchen McNeil

Possess by Gretchen McNeil
"Fifteen-year-old Bridget Liu just wants to be left alone: by her over-protective mom, by Matt Quinn, the cute son of a local police sergeant, and by the eerie voices she can suddenly and inexplicably hear. Unfortunately for Bridget, the voices are demons—and Bridget possesses the rare ability to banish them back to whatever hell they came from. Literally.

Terrified to tell her friends or family about this new power, Bridget confides in San Francisco’s senior exorcist, Monsignor Renault. The monsignor enlists her help in increasingly dangerous cases of demonic possession, but just as she is starting to come to terms with her freakish new role, Bridget receives a startling message from one of the demons. And when one of her oldest friends is killed, Bridget realizes she’s in deeper than she ever thought possible. Now she must unlock the secret to the demons’ plan before someone else close to her winds up dead—or worse, the human vessel for a demon king."- summary from Amazon

Possess is a really creepy, compelling, and mysterious debut. I absolutely loved it and found it hard to put down, which happened often since I'd be reading the book during my breaks at work and would have to force myself to put it away.

Bridget is a fun, sarcastic main character and I really enjoyed spending time with her, as well as with all her friends. It was nice having that balance between paranormal and normal since Bridget had to hide her power from pretty much everyone.

There are some interesting twists and turns and I liked reading about all the backstory of demons and this power to banish them. McNeil did a really good job with that; it never got info dumpy or anything like that. The climax of the book is basically edge-of-your-seat thrilling.

Overall, an awesome debut and I look forward to reading more from McNeil in the future!

FTC: Received ARC from publisher. Link above is an Amazon Associate link; any profit goes toward funding contests.