Poor Kirsten!

In the 1994 novel Driver’s Dead, teenage Kirsten is not only currently living in a house that she thinks might be haunted by the ghost of the son of the previous owners but she’s also somehow gotten a reputation for being a bad driver!  (Ironically enough, the son of the previous owners was also killed in a car crash …. or was he?)

When it come to having one’s driving unfairly criticized, I could relate to Kirsten.  I can still remember the pain of those days when I was “learning” how to drive.  Learning is in quotes because, quite frankly, I already knew how to drive.  I had seen enough TV shows and gone on enough road trips with my family to know which pedal to push and how to turn the steering wheel.  And yet, every driving instructor that I had to deal with insisted on being like totally critical of me.  One of the first times that I drove on the road, I got yelled at by the instructor because I didn’t look both ways before making a lane change.

“I looked in the rearview mirror!” I snapped.

Apparently, that was not the right answer because she kept yelling at me until I finally said, “How am I supposed to concentrate on driving with you talking all the time!?”

That also did not go over well.  That particular instructor refused to ride with me anymore.  I went home in tears so my mother went up to the school and yelled at all of the instructors for being rude to me.  The next time I drove, it was with the owner of the school, who was much nicer to me.  The owner of the school asked me if I had a lazy eye.  “Not anymore,” I replied.

Anyway, you get my point.  I somehow managed to get my license despite having to deal with some pretty clueless driving instructors.

Anyway, back to Driver’s Dead.  Kirsten decides to deal with her driving struggles by getting some help from Rob.  Rob shows her how to drive but it turns out that his father is a big-time racist and Rob is kind of a jerk as well.  When Rob tries to grope her, Kirsten tells him to get lost.  (Yay!)  Then Rob turns up dead.  Uh-oh.

Who murdered Rob and how is it connected to the blood that keeps seeping out from underneath the closet in Kirsten’s bedroom?  And what to make of Mr. Busk, the alcoholic driver’s teacher who has apparently never gotten over his experiences in Vietnam?

Driver’s Dead is a YA book from the mid-90s so it’s definitely a bit dated.  Check out the reference to floppy disks and running DOS on a computer!  Check out Kirsten’s crush on Jason Priestly!  But I still found it to be entertaining because Kirsten was a likable character and the plot neatly mixed the supernatural with a standard YA mystery story.

Plus, who can’t relate to being a better driver than most people realize?  Ghosts and murder aside, I shared Kirsten’s struggle.