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Book Review: Midnight Reynolds and the Spectral Transformer (Book 1) by Catherine Holt.

Midnight Reynolds and the Spectral Transformer: Book One by Catherine Holt
Albert Whitman & Company, 2017
ISBN-13: 978-0807551257
Available: Hardcover, paperback, Kindle edition

 

Midnight Reynolds was born at the stroke of midnight on Halloween. Her name and birthday have always made her stand out, when all she wants is to fit in. When her slightly wacky family– vegetarian recipe blogger mom, her fiance Phil (a mechanic who enjoys dressing like a Viking) and older sister Taylor– move to a new town, two popular girls, Sav and Lucy, immediately draw her in, and Midnight finds herself “fitting in” for the first time. The only problem is that Sav and Lucy both come from well-to-do backgrounds, while Midnight’s family is a little more financially stretched. So when Sav invites her to a week at a ski chalet over their winter vacation, Midnight has to find a job to earn the $200 she’ll need to buy things for the trip.  She takes a job with Miss Appleby, a neighbor with a broken leg. Miss Appleby was also born at the stroke of midnight on Halloween, and she tells Midnight that their birthday uniquely qualifies them to see ghosts, or “spectral energy”, and capture it. Miss Appleby has been doing this on her own, but now that she’s broken her leg, until she heals, she needs Midnight to do the ghost hunting. She explains to Midnight that spectral energyis dangerous. It possesses objects, and in order to remove it, Midnight will have to use a camera-like item called a spectral transformer to capture it. Once the spectral energy has been trapped on a glass plate, it can be separated later and held in a lead-lined tank in Miss Appleby’s yard.

While she’s working hard at fitting in and earning money (tw0 things that don’t necessarily match up) Midnight has additionally been partnered with the school goth, Tabitha, for a local history project. Midnight’s incredible organizational and spreadsheet skills (a weirdness she doesn’t share with her friends) and Tabitha’s interest in cemeteries and dead people are both valuable for the project, and it turns out that the two girls actually get along pretty well. Midnight can’t understand why Tabitha prefers her all-black look over friendship with Sav and Lucy, but most readers will pick that up right away, because you can’t not like Tabitha, and Sav and Lucy are pretty self-absorbed. Tabitha is into research and libraries (according to Tabitha, the librarian “may be a hacker, or a ninja”) and is also adventurous, so she turns out to be a perfect accomplice for Midnight as it turns out that Miss Appleby may not be telling the truth.

Midnight is an exasperating character, but we do get to see character growth.  I enjoyed seeing her change as she encountered unlikely aspects of characters who could have been left undeveloped.  Tabitha could have been a stereotypical goth girl, but Holt gives her context and a unique personality. Midnight’s soon-to-be-stepfather, who she is impatient with through the whole book, turns out to have hidden depths. Even cute boy Logan has more substance than I typically expect in a book this short. There are plenty of characters who still need fleshing out, but since this is the first book in a series, I expect we’ll see more of that in later volumes.

This isn’t a terribly scary book, but it does have its moments. Miss Appleby is responsible for some deeply disturbing actions, and Holt has strong descriptive powers. Midnight Reynolds and the Spectral Transformer  is an entertaining read for a tween looking for ghostbusting adventure and mild scares, and now that she’s come into her own, I’ll be interested to see what happens in book two. Recommended.

Book Review: The Phantom Hour (Babysitting Nightmares #2) by Kat Shepherd

The Phantom Hour (Babysitting Nightmares #2) by Kat Shepherd

Imprint, 2019

ISBN-13: 978-1250156990

Available: Hardcover, Kindle edition, audiobook, audio CD

 

This summer has been a great one for discovering books with all kinds of girls, from reckless risktakers to insecure new girls, facing their fears– literally.  What a victory for representation, am I right? I wanted to make a list, but I would have spent hours on it.

Babysitting Nightmares by Kat Shepherd is a series I want to see succeed like crazy. I encountered the second book, The Phantom Hour, at the library, and it is so much fun! Apparently there’s a third out now, The Ghost Light, so I’ll be back at the library soon.  The book centers on four friends, all seventh graders, with very different interests and backgrounds. Clio is the leader,  and the book is worth reading, if for no other reason, than to encounter her aunt, Kawanna, who runs a costume shop called Creature Feature located in a storefront on Coffin Street, wears a Godzilla print skirt, hosts horror movie nights for the girls, and drives them where they need to go on their secret missions without actually interfering. Doesn’t she sound like someone you’d want to be friends with?

If you were thinking “this sounds like The Babysitters Club dressed up with ghosts”, you’d be wrong. While there is a standalone storyline in this book, there’s also a thread that connects it to the first book and on into the third. In the first book, the four girls had to enter the Nightmare Realm to retrieve one of their charges who had been replaced with a changeling,  but apparently the Nightmare Realm is not done with them. So as they go about their daily lives and babysitting jobs, they also have to contend with containing the Nightmare Realm. In The Phantom Hour,  Clio takes a job babysitting for the Lee family, who have just moved into the abandoned Plunkett Mansion. Of course the mansion has a supernatural resident, and it’s up to Clio, with help from her friends, to figure out what’s going on and resolve it.  Shepherd does a nice job not just of portraying a diverse group of girlfriends (including three girls of color) who really support each other. The little girl Clio is babysitting is hearing impaired and she’s also represented respectfully.

While most hardcore horror lovers might not get much of a scare out of this book, it has some genuinely creepy and frightening moments– the ghost in the story is not a friendly one.  This series is a nice change from books about girlfriends who are crushing on boys and tearing each other down. It’s not every day you see a positive depiction of four smart, geeky girlfriends taking on and defeating the supernatural, and this one is tops.  Highly recommended.

 

Book Review: Peter Green and the Unliving Academy: This Book is Full of Dead People (The Unliving Chronicles #1) by Angelina Allsop

Peter Green and the Unliving Academy: This Book is Full of Dead People (The Unliving Chronicles #1) by Angelina Allsop

TCK Publishing, 2018

ISBN-13: 978-1631610646

Available: Paperback, Kindle edition, audiobook

Fourteen year old Peter Green wakes up on the floor of a hotel lobby wearing only pajamas and a silk tie, and discovers he is dead, has no memories of his life, and is stuck in Purgatory without them until he is 18, or family claims him. After navigating the bueracracy of Purgatory (and of course Purgatory has bueracracy) he is sent to a boarding school for other “orphans” or unclaimed children. Scoot, an action-oriented redhead who carries her head under her arm, and Charlie, a flamboyant dresser who can’t keep a secret, orient him to the school and get him to his first classes. Peter soon learns that the school isn’t just for the unliving– it’s also the home of monsters, most of whom are part of the staff. He quickly gets on the wrong side of the school bully, Shelly Grant, causing a number of mishaps, and is then invited to join BASA, a special club that trains students in the skills they need to become spies and assassins in the “community”.  As he adapts to school and throws himself into his training for BASA, he can’t let go of a feeling that he needs to help his family, and with the help of his friends, steals the file containing his memories.

The world building in this is nicely done, and I liked Peter’s friends– especially Charlie– and some of the other characters Allsop got into in depth, such as Katerina the witch. As a magical boarding school book, it’s pretty well done, and while there are some similarities to Harry Potter, it’s mostly not noticeable (the werewolf professor, the giant snake roaming the hallways, the special Halloween visit to town). Allsop also manages to make what could be a pretty grim and scary topic genuinely entertaining and even humorous at times . It’s Peter himself whose character and story are thin. Perhaps some of this is because he doesn’t have memories (and thus not much of a personality) for much of the book, but while individual adventures and incidents get exciting, the suspense of whether he’ll be able to get back to his family is just not there, until suddenly, it’s a time sensitive emergency.  I hoped that we’d see more of the school in a future book, as this appears to be the first in a series, but the ending of the book makes that unlikely.

Despite Peter’s age being set at 14, the book feels like it’s targeted at middle-grade readers rather than teenagers. Kids looking for a “magical boarding school book” should enjoy this one, and hopefully, now that Peter has his memories back, there will be further character development to make him more interesting in the next book. Recommended.