Of all the Jackaby books, Ghostly Echoes is my favourite. While it’s been a fun ride so far, this is where things start to get tense and serious for the crew and the narrative is shaped really well, balancing internal and external conflicts as well as relationship developments and tension between characters. It starts to feel more like a YA series than middle grade writing, let me show you why.

Part of a good YA novel, regardless of the genre, is tension. Tension is critical it keeping a reader engaged for it is the hook drawing them in, the reason they stick around to find out how things progress. Jackaby and Beastly Bones felt a little a little distanced from that tension as what they involved had little to no personal impact. In Ghostly Echoes, however, we get that personal connection. We get that tension building up and the seriousness of the situation, not only the main plot but the developing plot for the final book. It makes Ghostly Echoes exciting on a whole different front.

Pairing with that excitement are the great character dynamics within the crew and the conflicts between these characters. We have characters whose aloofness cracks, showing a vulnerable part of themselves. We have characters who become more than what they have been portrayed as – characters who become real and human and feel like characters we should actually be caring about. We have relationships between characters that are developing is such subtle, believable ways, getting some sympathy and investment from the reader. Ghostly Echoes has those benchmarks for a well written YA novel and it’s relieving to see such development in the series.

There are a few hiccups within Ghostly Echoes though, and that’s putting it lightly. It seems that some characters disappear from the scene whenever they aren’t talking. They will said something at the beginning of the scene, be M.I.A. for four pages of dialogue, then suddenly speak as if they had been off doing something else and just arrived back. It sounds a little dramatic when I say it like that, but it isn’t the first time this has happened and it’s not the last. It can be jarring to be reading a scene and have the main dialogue between two or three characters be intruded upon by a voice who hasn’t had any non-verbal reactions or body language cues to pick up on for that whole discussion. It’s a shame because it can simplify a scene, hence my mention of middle grade earlier. I’m not saying that middle grade is bad because middle grade is an essential stage of reading and imagining within a reader’s development. I’m saying that missing out on the showing aspect of conversations and only including the telling – the literal verbal exchanges – can seriously detract from the dialogue and developing ideas and opinions of a character.

I do still like Ghostly Echoes and I encourage middle grade readers and family of middle grade readers and early readers in the YA demographic to give Jackaby and the Jackaby series a go. Hopefully, you will get inspired and interested in the supernatural or paranormal aspects of the book, maybe the historical fiction setting too, and feel like delving further into those genres.