Supernatural

From the back cover:
Suze Simon finds it difficult to come across as an average teenager when she’s constantly visited by ghosts. Suze is a mediator, you see. And her boyfriend Jesse is, well, a ghost himself—from the 19th century!

Fellow mediator Paul Slater has figured out how to travel through time and alter Jesse’s future so he and Suze will never meet, leaving Suze in a conundrum. Does she let Paul succeed so Jesse lives an ordinary life in his own time period, leaving Suze with no memory of him? Or does she stop Paul and force Jesse to be a ghost forever? And all the while, Suze must cope with the perils of a normal teenage life.

Review:
This book was really ticking me off until the last hundred pages, but at least it ended the way it should have.

The problems:
1) Suze had never been more annoying. I swear I actually yelled at the audiobook when she was dallying in calling an ambulance at one point. She was also very slow to grasp the ramifications of stuff that’s happening.

2) Bits of the plot were super obvious. Fellow mediator Paul needed an artifact from the past to travel there. (Me: Gee, that random mention of a belt buckle found in Suze’s attic a few chapters ago totally makes sense now! La la la, wait for the story to catch up with my surmise.) Also, by the halfway point, I had completely guessed how the happy ending would be occurring.

3) Re-explaining. Two characters would be having a phone conversation, and something would be pointed out to Suze and she’d realize that it was true. And then she had to explain again why what has just been said was really true.

The good:
Pretty much anything Jesse, particularly seeing him in the past. The ending, though predictable and a little too convenient, was still satisfying.

Ultimately, I don’t really think the series lived up to the potential it showed originally. If Cabot could’ve resisted making Suze incredibly dense at pivotal moments, it would’ve gone a long way toward making this a truly stellar series. Still, even with its flaws, it is recommended.

From the back cover:
Suze is used to trouble, but this time she’s in deep: Ghostly Jesse has her heart, but Paul Slater, a real flesh-and-blood guy, is warm for her form. And mediator Paul knows how to send Jesse to the Great Beyond. For good.

Paul claims he won’t do anything to Jesse as long as Suze will go out with him. Fearing she’ll lose Jesse forever, Suze agrees. But even if Suze can get Jesse to admit his true feelings for her, what kind of future can she have with a guy who’s already dead?

Review:
Haunted was a bit of a disappointment after the previous installment, Darkest Hour, was so good. Not a lot happens, really. Paul shows up at Suze’s school and throws her into turmoil. Suze is convinced that Jesse does not return her feelings. Then Jesse beats Paul up. That’s kind of the whole plot. Well, and Suze learns she might actually be something called a Shifter instead of a Mediator, which comes with more dangerous powers.

Suze is pretty annoying in this book. At any one point there are three or four things she’s not telling anyone, she goes to the house of a boy she dislikes and distrusts and ends up smooching him, and she also is able to convince herself that Jesse hates her, which is obviously untrue. I rolled my eyes at her fairly regularly.

The blurb on the back of the book is also wrong. Suze agrees to let Paul teach her the Shifter skills he knows after extracting a promise from him that he’ll leave Jesse alone. There really isn’t any coerced dating going on, though they’ll obviously have to spend some time together.

Despite not being thrilled with this particular installment, I still must know how the story ends. One volume to go!

From the back cover:
Sixteen-year-old Susannah Simon acts as a middleman between ghosts and the real world. As a mediator, she helps the spirits move on into their next life, whatever that might be. Even though she tried not to, Suze has fallen head over heels for a 19th-century ghost, an extreme hottie named Jesse.

Most ghosts try not to antagonize a mediator when they want their help. So when Suze wakes up to a knife at her throat, she is scared and stunned to be facing such a disturbing dilemma. Should she find the secret to Jesse’s murder and lose him forever, or concede to the demands of his ex-fiancee’s ghost and condemn Jesse to spending eternity in her bedroom?

Review:
Darkest Hour is the best of The Mediator books so far for the simple reason that finally there is a plot that affects Suze personally. I never really believed that Jesse would be lost forever, but it gave a focus and a drive to the story that previous installments haven’t really had.

There were some Buffy parallels that I liked: Suze is forced to consider a lot of the things Buffy did regarding her relationship with Angel, like what sort of future could she and Jesse possibly have together? Later, events have made her numb, so hurt she can feel nothing but anger anymore. We’ve seen Buffy in this state a couple of times.

Not that the book wasn’t without flaws. The ghostly villains, Diego and Maria, were kind of lame. And if they’re new ghosts, then where have they been all this time? There was also another continuity error, this one having to do with the location of Suze’s bedroom. Shadowland makes a point of specifying that the windows in her room open onto the roof of the front porch. Yet somehow, in this book she manages to fall from said porch into a hole being dug in the backyard.

Darkest Hour also has the best ending of the series so far, including an intriguing mystery about another possible Mediator that was left in cliffhangery status. More like this, please!

From the back cover:
Suze Simon, a teenaged mediator who guides ghosts to the afterlife, is having a great time with her best friend Gina from New York. That is until four ghosts, the “RLS Angels,” show up looking for revenge. The angry spirits died in a car accident and they blame Michael Meducci, a nerdy boy with a crush on Suze.

Suze starts spending time with Michael to protect him. After all, she’s one of the few people who can see the ghosts. And Michael isn’t too bad—under those glasses he is even somewhat of a hottie. But there’s something strange about the accident that took the Angels’ lives. Is it possible they are rightfully seeking revenge on Michael? Could he be their killer?

Review:
This was definitely an improvement over Ninth Key. And, interestingly, Suze seems to’ve remembered that boy who asked her out in Shadowland. Maybe somebody else busted Cabot over that error.

The plot in Reunion is pretty similar to the first book, though it wasn’t bad. The most irksome thing was the unrealistic portrayal of popular kids. I just really have a hard time believing that they would really say some of the stuff said here.

In the positive category, Suze’s character also seems back on track, as she is less focused on boys and more on being snarky and protecting a classmate from vengeful ghosts. There were a few moments when she put herself in the path of danger and was a bit reckless/ruthless, and while these actions were pretty dumb, they also played up her resemblance to Veronica Mars, which was pretty much missing in the last book.

From the back cover:
Mediator Susannah Simon is a go-between for ghosts and the living. No hand-holder, this teenager is tough on the spirits who need her help. When the ghost of a murdered woman wakes Suze up one night to insist that she deliver a strange message, the 16-year-old just wants to get rid of her. But the ghost won’t give up.

Soon Suze is looking for a wealthy man called Red, who has an aversion to sunlight. When she finally meets him, he keeps staring at her neck, and Suze sees big trouble. Although he’s the father of the hottest boy in her class, he just might be a vampire.

Review:
I didn’t like this as much as Shadowland. Suze wasn’t as amusing and snarky. Instead, she suddenly became obsessed with her lack of a boyfriend and we got a lot more info on the topic of boys and the state of their abs.

As an additional bonus, there was an extremely irritating and stupid continuity error! Suze mentioned a couple times that no boy has ever asked her out. Except one just did in the last book, which took place a mere week before! I think Meg Cabot cranks out too many books to actually remember the specifics of what happened in each one.

The plot was more ambitious this time, and included a couple of twists I didn’t expect. These would’ve been more successful if the outcomes of the twists hadn’t been immediately obvious to me. I also couldn’t help from wanting to superimpose Buffy arcs upon this story, like Suze letting her friends in on the secret, or becoming more serious about her job.

All of these things aside, it was still pretty good and was a quick read. At least I still liked all of the Suze/Jesse interaction. Perhaps this is just a sophomore slump and the others in the series will be better.

From the back cover:
Sixteen-year-old Susannah Simon is a mediator who can see and speak with ghosts. As a bridge between the living and the dead, she gets called on to help troubled ghosts take care of unfinished business. Soon after she and her mother move from New York City to sunny California, Suze meets the sexiest boy she’s ever seen. But there are two problems: he’s a ghost, and he’s haunting her room.

Review:
This was YA supernatural fluff and I totally adored it! There isn’t actually much of a plot aside from one particularly hateful ghost wanting revenge on an ex, but it’s fun anyway. Cabot borrows heavily from the premise for Buffy and I suppose I should be annoyed by that, but it reads more like an homage than a rip-off.

The similarities:
* Susannah (a little Buffyish in character, but with the super snark of Veronica Mars—I obviously like her quite a bit!) has a supernatural ability/job that she did not ask for and cannot relinquish.
* This ability has gotten her into some trouble in her old town, and her mom is hopeful that moving to a new place, in the middle of her sophomore year, will be a fresh start.
* There’s an adult staffer at her new high school who knows what she is and can give some advice.
* The popular kids make overtures towards her, but she seems more inclined to hang with the “losers”—specifically one guy and one girl. The guy (quippy, but not as funny as Xander) has a crush on Susannah and is clearly oblivious to the feelings that the other girl (nothing like Willow, alas) has for him.
* Susannah meets a foxy dead guy who has been around for over a century and who helps her out when fighting the aforementioned hateful ghost.

Shadowland reads kind of like a pilot episode. It sets the theme, the mythology, and the characters without delving too deeply into any of those categories. At this point, I sort of expect the series to compare to Buffy’s first season without approaching the impact of the latter half of season two. I would be highly (pleasantly) surprised if Cabot managed to pull off something like that.