Rating: WORTHY!
read by?
Read very competently by Christina Moore, this audio book is book one of the 'Ghost Mysteries' series. I'm not a fan of series mostly because they tend to be filled with fluff, repetitive, and un-inventive, but some are worthy or reading. This one isn't. I didn't even realize this was the start of a series until I read some other reviews for it, but at least it wasn't in first person PoV! The reviews were a bit odd; even one and two star reviews said this was a good read. I don't understand how you can rate a novel two stars and say it's good in any way. This is why I don't subscribe to the five stars review system. It's really meaningless. A novel is either worth the time or it isn't, period. For me, and acknowledging that I am not its intended audience, this one wasn't.
It started out great. It was age appropriate (it's middle grade) and had a gripping beginning: Allie the fossil-hunting explorer is stuck about a hundred feet up a crumbling shale cliff face and thinks she's going to fall when a voice comes out of nowhere and talks her down safely with no more than cuts and abrasions for her troubles. Allie starts to hear the voice more often, and finds herself the beneficiary of a nice old blank diary - in which words start appearing slowly, rather like the diary in Harry Potter #2.
The problem with ghost and horror stories like this is that it makes no sense that the mystery is slowly unveiled. I see this all the time in this kind of tale - the horrors or the ghostly visitations begin slowly with random bits and pieces building to a crescendo. Why? The authors never explain that. Obviously it's to draw the reader in and build tension, but within the story it makes no sense. The Exorcist was a classic example of this kind of build-up, although that did contain some rationale for the slow burn - it was to draw in the priests and keep people confused, but in the case of this story, where Lucy Styles was evidently murdered, why did the ghost simply not tell Allie "I was murdered by X" right from the off? Nothing is offered to account for this!
If the ghost can talk Allie down a cliff face, clearly it has no problem with communication. Why not say "I'm Lucy, I have some 'splainin' to do! My body is buried at location X, and I was murdered by person Y, you can find evidence for this hidden in spot Z"? Clearly it's so the author can spin this out into a short story, but when nothing is given to account for the lethargy, it makes the story sound amateurish and fake.
That wasn't even the worst problem. Obviously in a children's story, the children have to be the center of the action. You can't have them failing to solve a mystery and encounter no danger or delight of sudden discovery because they handed-off the evidence to the police or to their parents, but there are ways of writing those scenarios which make them bear at least a veneer of realism. This author didn't even offer a mocking obeisance to realism. Even though a lot of her information comes from the ghost, Allie has Lucy's diary which at the very least offers motive for murder. Any police officer worth their salt would see that this was worth a look.
Allie could have gone to her parents (although her dad was a bit of a dick) or to the police with a reasonable expectation of seeing justice done, but she didn't. Her best friend, "Dub", proved to be a dick because he made only one really lame attempt to suggest going to the police and never suggested going to her parents at all. Maybe he was wise not to do so: Allie's father could see she was plainly scared one night, yet it flew right over his head like he was a moron. This bad dad never even noticed how scared she was. Worse even than this was that in writing the story this way, all that's revealed is that we have yet another female author who apparently delights in showing her main female character to be clueless. This is particularly evident in the dénouement where she completely fails to call for help even though help is within hailing distance, and she knows it. The ending is entirely predictable given the beginning. It reads like fanfic or amateur fiction.
I can't get with stories like that, especially not when they are young children's stories, which exemplify kids - and for no intelligent reason - acting like imbeciles or airheads. Why not just make Allie a blonde to complete the ridiculous cliché? I'm sure that there are children in the intended age range who will enjoy this story, but I don't think it's a good idea to write stories like this and I won't recommend this one or the series if it's anything like this first volume.
