Through the Looking Glass Children's Book Reviews
Darkest Hour
Fiction Series
For ages 12 and up
HarperCollins , 2004 ISBN: 978-0060725143
Suze Simon is spending her first summer in California and it is not turning out the way she expected. Instead of being able to laze around on a beach with her friends, Suze has had to get a job. Though Suze hates having to get up early, and she despises the “uniform” that she has to wear, the job – babysitting kids whose families are staying in the Pebble Beach Hotel – is not a bad one. She will be able to afford a stellar fall wardrobe and the kids are not that bad. So, on the whole things are going well.
And then two things happen that changes everything. First of all her stepfather and stepbrother find the skeleton of a dead person buried in the back yard, and secondly Suze discovers that her latest charge at the hotel is a mediator, a very young mediator.
Things quickly become very complicated. Suze is sure that the body in the back yard belongs to Jesse, the ghost who is living in her bedroom. The ghost whom she has, incidentally, fallen in love with. And she is even more sure of things when the ghosts of the two people who conspired to kill Jesse turn up to threaten Suze. More than a hundred years ago Jesse’s fiancée, Maria de Silva, asked her lover to kill Jesse. Now she is back, determined to ensure that no one finds out what she and her lover did.
In this fourth mediator book Suze’s relationship with Jesse definitely takes a turn in a new direction, and readers who have been working their way through the series will be excited by the new developments. Plus, two new characters join the cast, and they really shake things up in a big way. The author leaves her readers with intriguing questions, and teens are sure to find that they really want to know what happens next.
