Maddie is hiding. She spends most of her life hiding,
after her abusive relationship was finally ended when her disturbing power went
terribly out of control.
But now she’s being haunted – well, maybe, the ghost
claims he’s still alive and he needs Maddie’s help – if she will just leave the
house. Eventually forced when her own family becomes a target, Maddie has to
confront her powers, rebuild her sense of self and find her courage in the
outside world to save the lives of kidnapped children, including her own
nephew.
But that outside world is more complex than she ever
imagined – and Jon himself, the very very real ghost – definitely complicates
matters and Maddie’s wounded feelings.
I am going to struggle not to “not bad” this book to
death.
What do I mean by that? Well, take the romance. The
romance is apparent almost from the very beginning of this book. Maddie and Jon
see each other and there’s instant chemistry – which isn’t bad, even if it is
rather overwhelming – which is heavily spiced with lots of describing how
attractive the other is – but it’s not nearly as overwhelming as it is in other
books.
By the end of the book, the two are madly in love etc
etc. They’ve known each other for about a week. A week and they now cannot live
without each other. A week in which they’ve never really spent any true social
time, concentrating entirely on the mission. They are, effectively, strangers
but at least the true love forever doesn’t hit until the end of the book. Jon
tries to seduce a woman for information on kidnapped children as he has done
dozens of times before and Maddie gets jealous for no reason – but her snappiness
over it doesn’t last and she quickly gets over it (especially when he reveals
he just couldn’t do it because he can’t stop thinking of Maddie – ugh). Jon is
ridiculously protective of Maddie – but it stems from her own inexperience and
vulnerability that isn’t entirely unreasonable and she fights against it
repeatedly. Jon tries to drive her away for her “own good”, but at least his
behaviour was limited to distancing himself from her rather than active
cruelty. She’s struggling to control her powers and learns under his guidance –
but at least part of that growth comes from her own emerging confidence and
strength
And this really sums up the book. We hit a lot of the old
tropes, a lot of tropes that are either tired or problematic or both – but all
of them are handled as well as it is possible to handle them. It sounds like
terrible praise but my constant refrain is “this could have been so much
worse.” That doesn’t sound like a compliment – but it is. These tropes and
clichés were handled, if not necessarily well (I don’t think anything could
make me like them) then at least with a careful restraint to prevent them truly
destroying the book or at least making the story more irritating.
