Got an ARC of Past Midnight by Mara Purnhagen straight from Harlequin YA Paranormal, and I must say I was very pleasantly surprised by its quality and readability.
Charlotte Silver is the oft-overlooked younger sister in a family of ghost hunters. This is less weird than it sounds. Charlotte’s parents do not actually believe in ghosts, they’re more interested in disproving claims of hauntings while being unable to explain away a couple of strange “energy patterns” they’ve come across in their career.
Anyway, Charlotte happens to trigger some actual, somewhat malevolent sleeping ghosties during a filming session with her parents and older sister. The haunting begins in earnest as Charlotte begins to have cryptic dreams about a girl from the past century, and sinister thuds and thumps and thrown furniture begin to hammer in the ghostly message: find the dead girl, and somehow reunite her with her even deader parents.
And meanwhile Charlotte copes with starting her senior year at a new high school where a mysterious tragedy occurred last year, a new friend with big secrets, a fight with her older and much more glamorous sister, the bitchy rival in the AV club and the cute boy also in the AV club… Standard fare for your typical YA novel, very deftly handled.
The book’s weakness lies in its very-vanilla themes and storyline: nothing big is at stake, nobody is evil, no one’s life is risked and very little happens in the climax. YA books these days tend to push the envelope when it comes to dark themes and high stakes – for example, Sarah Rees Brennan’s “The Demon’s Lexicon” is in a completely different league compared to this. Perhaps it’s not always necessary to go dark and dangerous to be a good book, but the low conflict level in this one did detract from my ability to care what happens to Charlotte. I always knew she would be fine.
Then again, the book is what it is. Light reading is just as legitimate as.. er, dark reading?
The book’s strength is definitely in its solid narrative skills and likeable cast of characters. I can see why there will be two more books about Charlotte Silver. Recommended for younger teens.
4/5 stars!
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