Haunting Emma trilogy by Lee Nichols

Deception (2010), Betrayal (2011), Surrender (2011)

Recommended by: bookshelves of doom

Review:

When 17-year-old Emma’s parents do not return from an international trip, a former friend of her brother’s arrives to act as her guardian. He takes Emma to his family’s home in Massachusetts and she begins to attend the private school nearby. Although Emma has never been there before, she can’t deny that the house and school seem strangely familiar. In addition, Emma learns that she can see ghosts, and has certain ghost-keeping abilities.

Lee Nichols’ Haunting Emma trilogy has a lot of the tropes of its genre: love triangle, mean girls, main character’s powers are the most special, etc. The outcome of the love triangle is a foregone conclusion – which suitor is the most forbidden and mysterious? Bingo. Cue much romantic angst in second and third books, that strangely glosses over a highly unethical action taken by the chosen love interest.

Despite the tropes, I did enjoy the first book. I generally like stories where people can interact with ghosts – there is a built-in poignancy about that scenario and it appeals to me. And Emma gets to do a lot of cool ghost-related things in the first book as she explores her newly-realized powers. There was one power in particular involving a ring that was my favorite. And I did like that in the second book, a character who dies in the first book comes back as a ghost and I appreciated the attention paid to the emotional fallout from that transition.

That said, the second and third books were overall disappointing. There was no satisfying build to the climactic confrontation with the main villain. It turns out that the villain’s motivations stem from past events involving Emma’s family but since we hardly get to know Emma’s family, this connection has no real heft to it. The story about Emma’s powerful ancestor and that ancestor’s lover had more sense of real peril than the trilogy’s various battles with the villain.

The storyline of the second and third books gets needlessly and repetitively mired in the friendship/romance entanglements of Emma and her friends. On the one hand, yay for Emma having female friends who are interesting in their own right. I know that’s not a given with YA fiction. But Emma’s constant wondering “is this guy interested in this girl or in this other girl” only seemed to distract from the real stakes of the story.

And though the trilogy was mostly free from making Emma an excepto-girl who is “not like all the other girls”, it still slipped in the third book: “he understood I just wanted to be alone. It was more of a guy reaction to a problem. I’d noticed girls often liked to cry and relive every moment of distress with a friend. I wasn’t that kind of girl.” I probably groaned aloud when I read that. Again, most of the trilogy was free of that kind of statement, but still that sentence represents how I felt like the trilogy became more generic as it went along.

I picked up these books for the R.I.P. Challenge because of the ghosts, and I did like the ghosts, but reading this trilogy also reminds me why I generally steer away from YA fantasy.

Excerpts from others’ reviews:

bookshelves of doom – “In brief: YAY, FUN. Emma was likable and occasionally laugh-out-loud funny” (from review of the first book)

Lauren’s Crammed Bookshelf – “I’ve loved seeing her writing grow as the series progressed, and just like Surrender was the best of the series plot and character wise it was just the same with the writing.”