Spoiler Alert.
The following review gives away some aspects of the story that you may not want to know ahead of time. Stop reading now if you want to read the book and be completely and totally surprised.
Johnson, M. (2011). Shades of London Book One: The Name of the Star. New York, NY: G. P. Putnam’s Sons.
Rory (short for Aurora - a family name that only her grandmother actually uses), an eighteen year old native of Bénouville, Louisiana just outside of New Orleans, signs herself up for her senior year of High School at Wexford, an English boarding school in east London, while her law professor parents take their sabbatical year teaching in Bristol. Her arrival at school in late August coincides with a murder in the neighborhood that has all the hallmarks of a Jack the Ripper imitator and the English press is going wild. As Rory begins to settle in at Wexford - navigating the very English boarding school world of dorm-mates, prefects, and required sports - the Jack the Ripper murders continue and Rory has an encounter with a man who may be the perpetrator – an individual who happens to be invisible on any of the CCTV videos capturing the murders. The murderer, it turns out, is a ghost and Rory can see and hear ghosts.
Although the direction of this young adult ghost story is fantastic, the details of teen life and language ground it firmly in reality. Like any teenager dropped into a new school in a new country, Rory feels like a fool often and makes a lot of social mistakes. She seems to take it mostly in stride as she does here one morning at breakfast when her friends are talking about November 5th and Guy Fawkes Night: “It was clearly one of those mornings when I was particularly American. That happened sometimes.” (p.158) Rory has a lively sense of humor and often uses her southern American identity to her advantage such as in a conversation with her roommate Jazza when they are sneaking out of their dorm at night: “And if we get caught, I will claim I made you go. At gunpoint. I am American. People will assume I’m armed.” (p.97). Even as she begins seeing and talking with people that no one else can see and then meets the members of a top secret branch of the London police called the spooks (or the shades or even the London Graveyard) who share the ability to see ghosts, she remains a believable young person trying to figure out who she is and how she can use her supernatural abilities. Rory begins to build real friendships with Stephen, Callum and Boo (Bhuvana), the members of the elite secret police branch, as the investigation continues and as additional murders are (eagerly?) anticipated by the overactive British media. Not all the ghosts are bad either, some of them are even friendly and helpful so soon Rory is building connections and relationships not only with her Wexford cohorts Jazza and Jerome (an attractive prefect and Ripper know-it-all who she keeps making out with), but also, secretly with the London spooks and with people who happen to be dead (a.k.a. ghosts). Although it is ghosts and not zombies, in The Name of the Star, there are some similarities with Rot and Ruin by Jonathan Maberry. In both books the teen characters face normal teen issues such as dating and their relationship with authority while simultaneously being forced to deal with the paranormal in life-and-death situations. Although the combination of “English boarding school” and the supernatural might lead the reader to expect a Harry Potter-like adventure, this adolescent story takes place in a realistic contemporary London and the solutions are all technological not magical.
A creepy, present day ghost story-murder mystery with strong ties to Victorian London and dangerous supernatural events, this book was one that I found hard to put down. I was interested in these characters and truth be told, I really wanted to find out how they were going to manage their paranormal problem. I ended up staying up until midnight to finish the book in one long push to the end and when I finally reached the conclusion and turned out the lights, I was thoroughly spooked. In my experience, only the best ghost stories make you afraid of the dark.
One side note: I knew nothing about this book when I opened it up to read – having avoided reading the back or the flaps because they often give away too much information about the story. Because of this, I had no idea that this was the beginning of a series and I was therefore completely unprepared for the typical unsatisfying ending of a series book. The end raises more questions than it answers and leaves the reader wanting more.
