Hey, I didn’t know it won the Printz award!  Cool.

Repossessed is a young adult novel about a demon that takes over a teenage boys body in his(?) quest to find out what human life is all about.  After spending eternity guarding tortured souls in Hell, he wants to see what it is all about.  He wants to understand how bad sins really are and what it feels like to…well feel. 

Actually, it sounds sorta lame when I write it out.  It is actually quite a clever little book. Kiriel (the demon/spirit thing) snags the body of Shaun right before he steps off the curb and gets hit by a bus – so technically Shaun would be dead anyway, he had no more life to live.  Kiriel takes the life that Shaun has been taking for granted and attempts to just have experiences.  But he soon finds out that to truly experience being human, he has to make connections and the more connections he makes the more he wants to experience…

I did enjoy this book, though at times I wondered if teens reading it would feel as though the author was being too preachy about certain situations.  Other parts are just flat out hilarious when Kiriel first gets Shaun’s body and starts to do all the things he’s seen Shaun do that look like fun (yeah, you get to guess what Shaun, a teenage BOY does for fun…).  Jenkins does a good job of avoiding any religious controversy, avoiding terms like “God” and “Satan”.  And the idea of the Hell that Kiriel comes from is just different enough to make you think.  The book leaves you wanting more, but I think Jenkins ended it at just the right spot.

I’d give it a 3.5. outta 5.  Original and funny.