Aura is a sixteen year old with all the usual fears and confusions about relationships, love and sex but that’s not all: like the other ‘post-Shifters’, she has to deal with whinging ghosts and physically distressing shades but uniquely, she is also struggling with a thumping great mystery about her own birth and the disappearance of her mother. The first person narrative guides us through this melée of emotions and concerns. We feel Aura’s irritations with petitioning ghosts, her distaste for the police that deal with them, which mutates from some sort of teen rebellion against authority figures into adult concern about both their methods and aims, her frustrations when she tries to unravel the mysteries of her birth, and, more than anything else, her total confusion when faced with the apparent choice between Logan’s ghost and the growing love she feels for human Zachary.
This is all handled so expertly by Smith-Ready, that by the end, the reader is as desperate to find answers to the Logan/Zachary and birth/Shift mysteries, as Aura is herself. On the way, the first person immediacy, does also take us into territory which may raise some eyebrows: the night-time scenes with Aura and ghost-Logan are portrayed subtly but, nevertheless, the very fact of the ghost’s lack of corporeal substance takes us into areas of auto-arousal which make the book unsuitable for the youngest teens.
The finale brings a sort of closure to some of Aura’s issues, but enough questions remain unresolved to leave the reader gagging for the next book. Jeri Smith-Ready has already won awards for her adult fiction. Shade, her first teen novel, may well win her more.
Originally written for writeaway.org.uk
