Midnight Reynolds #1: Midnight Reynolds and the Spectral Transformer – Catherine Holt

Twelve year old Midnight is a colour-coded spreadsheet kind of girl. She lives with her mother and sister, Taylor, who is three years older tham Midnight. She’s dreading her mother’s wedding to fiancé, Phil, whose involvement in a Viking group is super embarrassing.

Midnight is keen to fit in at all costs with her new popular friends, Lucy and Sav, even if that means she has to wear uncomfortably tight clothes and find a job so she can save up to go on a ski trip with them.

Something strange happened to Midnight when her family moved to Berry; she began to see flickering white lights and hears buzzing that no one else seemed to notice. When Midnight meets one of her neighbours, Miss Appleby, she couldn’t imagine that it would lead to her joining Miss Appleby in hunting ghosts. Oh, pardon me, spectral energy.

“When someone dies, they leave behind an essence. In theory, their essence is meant to pass across to the Afterglow, but something different happens in Berry. There’s a phenomenon called a Black Stream – a huge ripple of electromagnetic currents that encircles our entire town and sucks spectral energy into inanimate objects. People’s energy gets stuck here, and when spectral energy stays in an inanimate object for too long, it festers and turns into something evil and endangers our whole town.”

Between trying to keep up with her popular friends, working with Miss Appleby, working on a history assignment with Tabitha and trying to avoid anything related to her mother’s upcoming wedding (which will no doubt be Viking themed), Midnight is exhausted.

I despised Midnight’s popular friends and wanted to hiss at them each time they opened their mouths. It pained me to see Midnight trying to be someone she isn’t in order to fit in. In contrast, I adored Tabitha, who likes visiting cemeteries, doesn’t care what people think of her and wears black, who has wonderful lines including:

“You’re welcome to send me an invitation to your pity party once this is all over, but right now we need to get to work.”

I also liked the boy crush that wanders through the pages. I hope he’s in the next book because he seems like a sweetheart. I enjoyed the introduction to the paranormal in this book and am really keen to read the next book. This feels like cheating but Midnight summed up my feelings about this book a lot better than I could.

“It is a little bit weird,” Midnight corrected, smiling. “But then again, I wouldn’t have it any other way.”

Once Upon a Blurb

When twelve year-old misfit Midnight Reynolds takes a job helping out eccentric Miss Appleby in the mansion down the street, she never imagined her work would involve battling ghosts. But as it turns out, Midnight and her new employer have quite a bit in common – they were both born on Halloween and have the power to see spirits of the dead. But when Midnight learns more about the history of her town, she starts to wonder if she’s fighting on the right side.