'Demelza loves science - she loves it so much that she stays up late to work on her inventions. But she soon discovers she's also inherited a distinctly unscientific skill: Spectre Detecting. Like her grandmother, she can summon the ghosts of the dead. But when Grandma Maeve is kidnapped, Demelza and her pasty-faced best friend, Percy, must leap into action to solve the deadly mystery ...'
Science loving Demelza Clock lives with her grandmother Maeve in her small cottage, inventing weird and wonderful devices by day, and dodging her stern headmistress at school by day. Despite having lost her parents at a young age Demelza is a happy child, and loves her grandmother deeply, possibly due to the fact that her grandmother allows Demelza to pursue her aspirations to become an inventor, never stifling her granddaughter's creative spirit.
One night Demelza is awoken by strange noises in the house, noises that she can't track down to any logical source. Convinced that it must be people trying to break into her home she invents a new device to trap them, and ropes her friend Percy in to help her. Percy is a little nervous about sneaking out at night to assist Demelza, due to him being allergic to almost everything and having been kept indoors by his father for years, but agrees to go along and help.
However, when Demelza discovers a strange trap door in her grandmother's greenhouse she discovers a secret that will change her world forever. She learns that her grandmother is a Spectre Detector, a person capable of summoning spectres from the land of the dead back to earth, where they can be given the change to say goodbye to their loved ones. Not only that, but Demelza has these powers too, and they've begun to awaken.
Now that Demelza had begun to discover that she has amazing powers she begins to learn about the world of Spectre Detecting, and things seem to be going well for her. But, she learns that a mysterious figure has been kidnapping young apprentices and killing them, trying to force them to bring someone back from the dead fully. When her grandmother is taken and Demelza receives a ransom note demanding that she surrender to this person she has to call in every ally she can to help save her grandmother.
Demelza and the Spectre Detectors was not the book I was expecting it to be. My partner read it before me, which is something she never really does as she doesn't do much reading, but read the whole thing in two days and was raving about it. So, I decided to pick it up and give it a go, knowing only that it was about a girl called Demelza who loves inventing things. If I'd had read the blurb I'd have been less shocked about the ghosts (sorry, spectres!) but that's on me.
One of the things I really enjoyed about the book was how despite it being about magic powers, about ghosts and mystical rituals, Demelza is a girl who believes in science. She not only loves inventing, but comes to things from a scientific viewpoint. She wants to see proof of things before she believes them, and as such discovering a world of magic and spirits is probably more shocking to her than anyone else, as it's so outside of her sphere of understanding of the universe than anything that's come before. It makes a nice change to see a young protagonist not just simply believing fantastical things, but coming to it from a more adult place of wanting proof and evidence first.
However, once she does come to accept that spectres are real she soon finds that she has a flare for the work, and seeing her learning to bring spirits into the world is a fun part of the book, and Holly Rivers has created some interesting rules for this world and outlines how things work in a way that's pretty simple to grasp, yet has some complexities to it. Compared to some middle-grade books I've read that try to add too much complexity to their magic it's much easier to understand, and I think younger readers will get on board with it pretty quickly.
Despite having a fun tone to it, with a sense of silly and whimsy that you'd find in the more fun children's fantasy books there are some moments of genuine tension scattered throughout, such as Demelza having to hide from kidnappers, or the startling revelations that come in the final confrontation. These moments help to ground some of the more fantastical and whimsical parts of the book, and give the story an added weight and sense of danger that would otherwise be missing. And whilst I'm not going to talk about the final part of the book in any detail as it can't be spoilt, oh my god, I yelled out loud at what happened because it was so, so good.
Holly Rivers has written a wonderfully engaging and imaginative book, one that really draws the reader in with lovable characters and a sense of wonder. I hope that this is just the first of many books with Demelza as the lead, because I'd be extremely happy to go back to this world for several more adventures.
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