Vibes -- Amy Kathleen Ryan

Kristi isn't a particularly nice person.  She's rude, snarky and combative.  Also, she's been hiding a cat in her bedroom for two years despite her mother's crippling allergies and she occasionally plays mean tricks on unsuspecting strangers.  But it's hard to blame her:

If you're wishing you were psychic, too, believe me, you do not want to know what people are thinking.  People are mean, nasty, selfish slobs, and 99 percent of the time their brain vibes hurt your feelings and you have to go around trying not to remember that Gusty Peterson, the cutest guy in school, looked at you yesterday and thought, Sick.

I mean, if you had to go around all day listening to other people's thoughts, wouldn't you be a little messed up, too?

I really liked Vibes.  I originally picked it up because I wanted something pink and mindless and light, but it turned out to be much more than that.  (Regardless of that, the cover does work -- Kristi regularly blasts opera on her headphones to drown out the voices.)  Vibes is different and original, and it's because of Kristi. 

She's pretty darn mean on a pretty regular basis, but she's also got darn good reasons for being angry and withdrawn.  She acts much tougher than she is.   

The descriptions of Kristi's clothing -- usually something I'm not a very big fan of -- were awesome, because Kristi makes almost everything in her wardrobe out of fabric she finds or gets second hand.  So, for instance, she has clothes made of everything from Mylar balloons to old umbrella fabric to an awning and pretty much anything else you could imagine.  So, yes.  She's hugely creative -- even her pranks reflect that creativity -- without being artsy-fartsy.

She's also hilarious:

Jacob's parents are English, but that's not the reason they're weird.  They're so pale that when you first see them you think they're dead, and when you get to know them, you wish they were.

As for the story-telling, I really appreciated the fact that the author slowly let the reader in on Kristi's past, rather than just throwing it all out there at once.  (It was kind of like a strange sort of reverse fishing -- she hooked me immediately, but then kept playing the line out bit by bit so that the further I went, the more hooked I was... uh, actually, that's plain old fishing, isn't it?  My grandfather would be so disappointed in me.  Anyway.)  While I had one of the story lines figured out from minute one, all of my other theories and opinions stayed in a constant state of flux because Kristi is also a bit of an unreliable narrator:  for the majority of the book, I wasn't sure if she was actually psychic or if she was just projecting her thoughts and assumptions about other peoples' thoughts.

Well-written, thoughtful, super-funny... and due out in October.