Spirit by JP Hightman

Spirit by JP Hightman

Honestly, I was prepared to like this. I heard it was scary-I like scary.

50 pages in (there are 212) and I found the young couple, Tess and Tobias lively and endearing, but the only way I could believe in them as characters was to pretend they were 25 rather than 17. This is a book aimed at teens, so apparently teens will only read about characters who are teens? I have no experience in this . The few books I read as a teen were for classes, but yes, most of the time they featured teens. I’m sure there’s research out there to support this? Right? But what I don’t get is this: why are teens more than willing to watch TV shows and movies that have characters who aren’t their age, but won’t read books that don’t feature their peers…..oh, IDK!

Anyway, back to the story of Tess and Tobias (who have really cool names). This young married couple live on some inheritance during the 1890’s, you remember, the age of repression and manners and more repression and high collars and corsets, yeh, that era! But heck, no problem for T2, nope, that’s coz Tobias is a modern sort of man who doesn’t hold his woman on a leash. Bully for you, Toby! And bully to the couple for telling everyone on the train that they were ghost hunters! That’s mighty hard work that usually never gets the recognition it deserves.

The actual conflict of the story is that the couple and a bunch of other freaks are headed to a winter carnival near Salem Massachusetts. The carnival is the premise, but most of the passengers are more intrigued by the ghost story about three witches who were hung there 200 years before, seems these spirits aren’t at rest and that they haunt the area.

The main baddie is Malgore, some immortal nasty black magic practicing witch. She has tons of power at her disposal and uses it to derail the train, murder the passengers and torment T2 through most of the book. This action wasn’t filled with tension and I just wanted to see what T2 would do to end this mess. Finally, Tess, like all good hunters, figures out a way to kill her (from an older, but now dead hunter’s journal). In the end, it’s all ding dong the witch is dead-but there’s a twist. Seems that the other two spirits, who we’ve accepted as benevolent victims throughout, have their own agenda-possessing T2. This possession happens at the end of the book, but I don’t think I’ll be picking up a sequel any time soon.

I’m torn on the age appropriateness of this one. I’m thinking grade 6 up because there is killing, but it’s not described in detail. The bodies aren’t described with the exception of it saying Malgore ripped out the man’s skeleton and his empty skin sagged to the ground. The images of Coraline by Gaiman (think of the other!father) seem just as graphic.