Midnight Reynolds and the Spectral Transformer: Book One by Catherine Holt
Albert Whitman & Company, 2017
ISBN-13: 978-0807551257
Available: Hardcover, paperback, Kindle edition

Midnight Reynolds was born at the stroke of midnight on Halloween. Her name and birthday have always made her stand out, when all she wants is to fit in. When her slightly wacky family– vegetarian recipe blogger mom, her fiance Phil (a mechanic who enjoys dressing like a Viking) and older sister Taylor– move to a new town, two popular girls, Sav and Lucy, immediately draw her in, and Midnight finds herself “fitting in” for the first time. The only problem is that Sav and Lucy both come from well-to-do backgrounds, while Midnight’s family is a little more financially stretched. So when Sav invites her to a week at a ski chalet over their winter vacation, Midnight has to find a job to earn the $200 she’ll need to buy things for the trip.  She takes a job with Miss Appleby, a neighbor with a broken leg. Miss Appleby was also born at the stroke of midnight on Halloween, and she tells Midnight that their birthday uniquely qualifies them to see ghosts, or “spectral energy”, and capture it. Miss Appleby has been doing this on her own, but now that she’s broken her leg, until she heals, she needs Midnight to do the ghost hunting. She explains to Midnight that spectral energyis dangerous. It possesses objects, and in order to remove it, Midnight will have to use a camera-like item called a spectral transformer to capture it. Once the spectral energy has been trapped on a glass plate, it can be separated later and held in a lead-lined tank in Miss Appleby’s yard.

While she’s working hard at fitting in and earning money (tw0 things that don’t necessarily match up) Midnight has additionally been partnered with the school goth, Tabitha, for a local history project. Midnight’s incredible organizational and spreadsheet skills (a weirdness she doesn’t share with her friends) and Tabitha’s interest in cemeteries and dead people are both valuable for the project, and it turns out that the two girls actually get along pretty well. Midnight can’t understand why Tabitha prefers her all-black look over friendship with Sav and Lucy, but most readers will pick that up right away, because you can’t not like Tabitha, and Sav and Lucy are pretty self-absorbed. Tabitha is into research and libraries (according to Tabitha, the librarian “may be a hacker, or a ninja”) and is also adventurous, so she turns out to be a perfect accomplice for Midnight as it turns out that Miss Appleby may not be telling the truth.

Midnight is an exasperating character, but we do get to see character growth.  I enjoyed seeing her change as she encountered unlikely aspects of characters who could have been left undeveloped.  Tabitha could have been a stereotypical goth girl, but Holt gives her context and a unique personality. Midnight’s soon-to-be-stepfather, who she is impatient with through the whole book, turns out to have hidden depths. Even cute boy Logan has more substance than I typically expect in a book this short. There are plenty of characters who still need fleshing out, but since this is the first book in a series, I expect we’ll see more of that in later volumes.

This isn’t a terribly scary book, but it does have its moments. Miss Appleby is responsible for some deeply disturbing actions, and Holt has strong descriptive powers. Midnight Reynolds and the Spectral Transformer  is an entertaining read for a tween looking for ghostbusting adventure and mild scares, and now that she’s come into her own, I’ll be interested to see what happens in book two. Recommended.