2 out of 4 stars
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Penny Lane, Paranormal Investigator: The Ouija Board Mystery by David J Cooper is a young adult* novella about a group of friends who must face deadly consequences for using an Ouija board in a haunted manor. This novella is the first in what will be a series of six (books 2-6 being The Candy Floss Killer, The Old Mill, Slay Bells, The Pity Hole, and The Other Side) about Penny Lane. In this first book, The Ouija Board Mystery, one of the six high schoolers is killed in an accident, and the other five girls, feeling guilty about the disaster, attempt to contact her using a homemade Ouija board. Things do not go as planned, and the girls must turn to Penny Lane, a young woman in town with a paranormal gift, for assistance. It's a race against time to appease the ghost as they begin being picked off, one by one, in bizarre accidents. The book is rated 2 out of 4 stars.
This book's greatest strength was the setting. After a cautionary warning about using Ouija boards, the author launches into an explanation of the setting, where he describes not only the village but its' most well-known occupants. It was quite a strong start to the book, and it left me hopeful, but as the story progressed, I realized that the descriptive parts about the town and surroundings (including the photos) were the best. Buckleigh is very much alive. It's a pity that the characters are not.
With the exception of Sadie and perhaps Polly, the girls were more or less interchangeable in terms of personality, and it was difficult to discern much about the others from their few remarks. Penny herself is rarely in the story, and based on her few appearances and what little she does, I hesitate to call her a real investigator. She is a curious character, and I liked her well enough, but she was hardly a real presence in the story (I would say the heroine is Sadie). Her skills seem...questionable, at best. She seems to fail at finding all of the missing children she tries to help the police with. Her suggestion that they bathe in the ocean to be cleansed, instead of getting blessed with holy water as one suggests, is peculiar. When she has a dream that one of the girls will die in a car accident and decides she must warn her, all she does is tell her to drive carefully, lest she frighten her. Her advice is incomplete, and most older readers would catch her glaring omission, which ultimately leads to several deaths.
The plot itself is shaky, and for a simple storyline it makes little sense at times. The disturbing events that begin plaguing the girls apparently take place two years after they are threatened by Alicia's ghost. It is never explained why they have no problems for two years, and then all of a sudden disaster strikes for all of them. Polly's interaction with a ghost after the event is both benign and entire unrelated, and three of the girls experience no ghostly experiences at all when Penny declares that they are all being haunted and must destroy the board. When three people (not four, as the summary indicates) are killed in the third year, one of them had never even used the Ouija board. All were killed due to a head injury, like Alicia, and it is suggested that she is getting her revenge, after it is discovered that it was not Alicia threatening them at all. It is also worth noting that there is no real mystery - there is never any attempt to make amends with the real Alicia, nor are any of the evil ghosts confronted.
The tale is also just downright bizarre in areas. On the very first page, you discover that "Penny always used to say, 'You don't contact the dead. When spirits want to contact you, they will!!' She always avoided the word 'dead'..." which I admit was a little offputting for page 1. At one point, when the author is describing a haunted manor that the girls are going to, he comments, "The Manor is maintained by English Heritage and it costs 40p to go inside." This was such an out-of-place statement that I had to go look up the manor and see if it actually existed (it didn't). Furthermore, this manor, supposedly maintained with an admission fee, "was like something out of a Dracula movie" in its' disrepair, and one could even camp on the grounds! Perhaps this is how historic homes are handled in England? Another peculiar event was Daisy's wedding, which took up a significant part of the story despite it not contributing to the plot at all. It was called both "hippie" and "Druidic" - "They had chosen this type of wedding ceremony because they lived that type of lifestyle". What lifestyle? She never came across as particularly "hippie"-ish, and certainly not like a Druid. I am unsure how these things are related, either, though the Druids in this story have the sword Excalibur and bless weddings, so I am equally unsure what the author means by Druids.
The writing style was quite simple, and most "paragraphs" are a single sentence, which not only leads to a lot of blank space on the pages, but clips the flow of reading. Another frustrating stylistic issue was the usage of "!!" at times, which made me feel as if I were reading a childrens' book.
All told though, it was actually an enjoyable story, and therefore I gave it the rating that I did. I read it in a single sitting and laughed out loud at several parts. I think this book, with a little reworking, could be a good story for intermediate readers who are looking for a step above Scooby Doo, but I do not think it makes it to the "Young Adult" genre. For all of its' issues on a critical writing level, it was undeniably an entertaining (and at times, oddly cute) read. I would read the next in the series.
2 out of 4.
(*Though this book was labeled crime/thriller, I discovered through an author interview that this series is meant to be geared towards young adults.)
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Penny Lane -Paranormal Investigator
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