Meg Cabot, The Mediator series
Macmillan/HarperCollins, 2000–2005
The story of a ghost-hunter!
The Mediator is a rather unusual series from Meg Cabot, author of the immensely successful Princess Diaries books. Sixteen-year-old Susannah Simon's mother has just married a home improvement cable show host and moved halfway across the country to be with him, forcing her to grapple with a new school, new friends, a new stepfather and three new stepbrothers.
But Susannah has another little problem in her life. She is a mediator, which means, she can communicate with the dead. Specifically, she can see and talk to people who have died but whose souls have not moved into the next—what?—dimension because they have unfinished business to attend to. That is where Susannah comes in—to help them and free them to move on.
Her new family lives in Carmel, California, in a refurbished nineteenth-century house. Stepfather Andy is a dab hand at anything build-able and is a great cook. He's quite a cool chap, in all. She finds her two older stepbrothers, Jake and Brad, quite dispensible to humankind; the youngest, David, is her favourite. The house is grand and her mother finally happy (after having lost her husband, Susannah's father, about a decade ago), so Susannah decides the changes are perhaps for the better. And, perhaps, finally her frequent brushes with the law in her old home due to her mediating activities are at an end.
However, Susannah's troubles are just starting. She finds that her room is haunted by the ghost of twenty-year-old Jesse de Silva, who was murdered in the 1850s! Annoyed at first at having to share her room with some guy who is 150 years dead, she slowly comes to appreciate Jesse's plus points, not the least of which are his magnificent abs (visible through the half-unbuttoned linen shirt he wears) and his deep brown eyes and the way his hair curls on the back of his neck... well, you get the drift.
Attending her new school, the Junipero Serra Mission, Susannah realizes that the elderly principal, Father Dominic, is a fellow-mediator, and the two strike up an unlikely friendship. With Father Dom as her mentor, Susannah tries to be a normal (well, almost) teenager by day and ghost helper by night. However, things don't always work out the way you want them to when you're sixteen, do they? More often than not, she finds herself in sticky situations and many times ends up bruised and battered—despite being very quick on her feet and handy with her arms and legs. And Father Dom and Jesse the ghost have their hands full keeping her out of trouble.
Also in the mix is the ghost of Susannah's father, who died of a heart attack some ten years ago while jogging in the park. For some reason, he has not moved on, and keeps manifesting from time to time to find out how his daughter is. Sometimes it is plain annoying. Sometimes, a girl could do with a father's advice:
He smiled. He looked no different than the day he died... No different from the dozens of times he had visited me since then. He was still wearing the shirt he'd died in—the shirt I'd slept with for so many years.
"I heard you were having some... issues," my dad said. That's the problem with ghosts. When they aren't haunting people, they sit around in the spectral plane, gossiping. Dad had even met Jesse... a prospect I found too horrific to even contemplate sometimes.
And of course, when you're dead... well... there isn't a whole lot to do. I knew my dad spent a goodly portion of his free time basically spying on me.
(Mediator 6: Heaven Sent, p.111)
Like most Cabot books, this one is written in first person, and is a hilarious, rollicking account, despite the seemingly spooky subject. It isn't laughs all the way, though, as Susannah comes up against some dead people who are bad news, and some live ones who are worse. Complicating matters even more is that she falls in love with Jesse!
When helping ghosts is your vocation and the love of your life is a glowing spectral image that doesn't breathe (even though he can do various 'other' things quite well!), you know you have serious problems.
The Mediator series consists of six books (and it seems unlikely there will be a seventh, though who knows). The following are the titles of the Macmillan (UK) editions (HarperCollins [US] ones in brackets):
- Love You to Death (Shadowland)
- High Stakes (The Ninth Key)
- Mean Spirits (Reunion)
- Young Blood (Darkest Hour)
- Grave Doubts (Haunted)
- Heaven Sent (Twilight)
RATING: 7/10