Meg Cabot's Mediator Series has been out for about six years, but even though I love Meg Cabot I never tried them out. Once I got my nook I decided to download the first book, Shadowland
since it was fairly cheap and I was looking for a good escapist book and I know Meg Cabot always delivers that. And I was write, because I could not put Shadowland down. Suze just moved to California from her home of sixteen years, New York. She is not enthused about the move at all, to say the least. She has to live with her mom and her mom's boyfriend as well as his three sons. But they're not so bad, the worst part is Jesse, the dead cowboy that is haunting her new bedroom. Except, well, he is a little cute. Oh but then there is the dead high school girl haunting her new Catholic high school, and she is looking for revenge. How can Suze see all of this stuff? Because she's a mediator, a communicator between the living and the dead.
I've always thought mediators were kind of fascinating and I think Cabot does a great job of really showing some of the problems that might arise if you were sixteen years old and saw dead people. Like, how would you tell your mom? And if you decided not to tell her, how would you hide something like that? I feel like Meg Cabot always puts herself into the situations she is writing about and imagines going through a normal life with whatever problems the characters have. She becomes her characters, and that makes for YA books that I can never put down. This was the perfect summer read for me, a little creepy and a little awesome. Suze is pretty badass too, which anyone who reads my blog knows I love. She's got her leather jacket that she wears to death even though her mom hates it and she sneaks out of her room in the middle of the night to go kick some ghost butt.
But the book also deals with normal teenage stuff, like fitting in. Obviously being a mediator doesn't make Suze the most popular girl in school, that is until she gets to her new school where everyone is amazed that she can save so many people from falling beams. And Suze speaks her mind. She flat out tells the most popular girl in school that she thinks she is totally rude. She basically says and does everything you wish you had said and done in high school- but she's still insecure, and she's still a normal teenage girl. She's still pining away for a boy that is way out of her league. Let's just say this book took me back a couple of years to my own high school days. My biggest gripe with this book was that the plot was too rushed towards the end, and I felt like an important character fell out of the story for awhile so it was little jarring when he came back. I fully plan on reading the next book in the series though.
Shadowland gets a C.
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