Review

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SPOILER ALERT!

This is a review of #2 in the Shades of London series, so it contains major spoilers for Book #1 – The Name of the Star.

Turn back now, while you have the chance!

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This is just a Maureen Johnson stan blog now because I can’t stop reading her books. (Despite the covers.)

It’s Book #2. In Book #1, Rory, an American teen in London, discovered that she could see dead people (aka ghosts), and that London has a special small police unit for fighting ghost-related crime. After being left for dead in a special sort of way which I can’t now remember, she has developed a unique power: she can terminate ghosts with her touch. This is a useful skill, especially given that the terminuses – special ghostbusting devices – that the police used in the first book have been destroyed. Rory is now their only way of getting rid of malicious ghosts, and that’s why the government has secretly pulled strings to get Rory back to her boarding school in London.

But Rory is feeling a bit messed up. She nearly died in a very nasty way. Things are rocky with her boyfriend. She’s hopelessly behind on her school work and can’t raise enough care factor to do anything about it. And she can see ghosts and she can’t talk about it to anyone except for Stephen, Boo and Callum, her ghost-fighting police… friends? Colleagues? She gets some counselling from new character Jane, which helps her relax a bit, but it’s hard to get too relaxed when there’s a big crack in central London, and ghosts from a centuries-old mental asylum are surfacing through it…

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So… this novel didn’t have the same sort of plot coherence and through-line as Book #1, but:

a) it’s the middle book of a trilogy; and

b) I don’t care.

I feverishly page-turned my way through this one, totally ignoring more worthy books I was supposed to be reading. Rory’s first person narrative voice is funny & sassy, with great descriptive imagery. The action was left on a big cliffhanger, with narrative bombs dropping left and right (very MJ – not much happens for the first half and then the second half gets hectic). Now I really want to read the next book and everything Maureen Johnson’s ever written.

And may I just say that, although there is very little romance in this novel, what there is, is both A++ and PG.

13+

Verdict: addictive, ghostbusting page-turner

> Click here for content warnings (potential spoilers)

YA depictions/reports of: ghosts; tarot cards; violence; supernatural violence; mentions of suicide; ghost-suicide and ghost-suicidal ideation; underage drinking; traumatised people; counselling; drugging without consent; murder scenes and human remains; murder; cults; car accident; fatal head trauma; life support; falling to death; kidnapping

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Johnson, M. (2013). The madness underneath. HarperCollins.

Images are used on this blog post under the “Fair dealing for criticism or review” provision of the Commonwealth Copyright Act, 1968.