‘Vibes’ is a book by Amy Kathleen Ryan about Kristi Carmichael, a teenage girl who is surviving high school facing the typical problems most teenagers have-- parents, friends, ex-friends and crushes. But what’s different about Kristi is not in her “found wardrobe” of eccentric clothing made by her using unusual materials like potato sacks and “fabrics of ripped-up umbrellas”. It’s her psychic ability to read people’s minds.

The main character Kristi really piqued my interest. When I read the summary of the story on the back of my book, my first thoughts were that this is not the usual girly book mixed overridden by some cheap sci-fi. She isn’t your typical female protagonist. She’s not the girly Mary Sue or the butt-kicking world-saving teenager who happens to perfectly balance her job and her school life. She is relatable with the exception of being a mind-reader. Kristi goes to Journeys, her “hippie-dippie school that offers children and teens a self-directed, cross-disciplinary, non authoritarian education in an emotionally safe environment”. Sounds fun right? “It’s excruciating” Kristi says, which is totally understandable for someone who can peer into people’s thoughts. This can be because realistically, people think a lot and it can be a mix of positive and negative things, and in Kristi’s situation, she isn’t really the most popular or liked girl in her school, so what she hears are internal negative comments from people she probably doesn’t even know. If it’s already bad hearing people talk negatively about you, imagine tons of people thinking bad things about you with no way to stop it.

When I finished the book, I felt happy and at the same time irritated and disappointed. I felt happy that Kristi realizes her faults and decides to change her ways. She bonds more with her mother and becomes a better friend to Jacob. What irritated me about this book was Kristi’s ignorance towards anorexia. “This makes me think,” she says in the book, “All this time I’ve made fun of Evil Incarnate for being anorexic. I never thought that she might die from it.” I understand Kristi’s hatred towards the character Eva, but I feel like it’s quite low of her to make fun of someone with anorexia. I suppose it’s one of the character’s flaws, but to me, Kristi seems like a girl who isn’t dumb. She listens to opera, writes a poem in the book and has an extensive vocabulary. So it just doesn’t piece up to her personality how she doesn’t know what anorexia is.

Also it really made me feel sorry for the victims of her pranks. Surely if she meant no harm then she wouldn’t go through so much to plot a prank that could potentially hurt a person. It makes me question society and how teenagers are taught these days. I don’t know if she thinks it’s okay to do pranks like these even if they’re harmless, and it makes me reflect on what I experience in my life with teenagers like me. I encounter some careless and boisterous people who are extremely oblivious towards other people’s emotions and safety, and I wonder why they have to act that way. I wonder why they don’t think before doing something that could harm a person physically or emotionally. Even the smallest things make a big difference. A simple hello can make a person’s day and a simple bad joke can ruin it. Of course, something as large as the pranks Kristi pulls can cause a terrible effect when it goes wrong, and it does. In one prank, Kristi throws sand on a woman who is jogging and she ends up “...squeezing her eyes shut, then trips over her own feet and falls hard onto the pavement.” In this particular prank, she brought her new friend Mallory and to my amazement, he finds the scene amusing and laughs at it and even calls her a “master”, referring to her prank as a “work of art”. Kristi, however, does not feel too good about what she has done and regrets it.

The end of the book felt like a cliched letdown and failed to maintain the standard that the rest of the book gave