Review: One Hundred Candles (Past Midnight #2) by Mara Purnhagen

Release date: February 22, 2011
Synopsis (via Goodreads):

It’s taken a long time for Charlotte Silver to feel like a normal teenager. But now that she’s settled in a new school, where she’s made friends who know about her parent’s infamous paranormal investigations, it feels like everything is falling into place. And what better way to be normal than to go on a date with the popular Harris Abbott? After all, it’s not as if Noah is anything more than a friend.

But Charlotte’s new life takes a disturbing detour when Harris takes her to a party where they play a game called One Hundred Candles. It all seems like harmless, ghostly fun. Until the spirits supposedly unleashed by the game start showing up at school. Now, Charlotte, her friends and her family are in very real danger, and the door that she’s opened into another realm may yield deadly consequences.

My Thoughts: It can always be a little tricky picking up the second book in a series without having read the first.  Not that every seems to stop me.  While the references to the events in book 1 kept things more or less above board, I was left wondering why Charlotte was the person who was singled out for a brush with the supernatural.  From what I picked up, it didn't seem to be addressed in the first book and it wasn't addressed here, which leads me to think this might part of the ongoing arc.

While the book was a fast read, I did feel that it got bogged down with a little too much repetition.  Things were mentioned in one chapter and then mentioned again a chapter or two later.  I did enjoy that Charlotte is just trying to be a normal girl in a family that makes its living doing something decidedly not normal.  Being drawn into debunking the ghostly goings on at her school simply because it's what she's grown up doing and how she's been trained to think keeps her in the limelight when she'd rather not be.

There's a touch of romance, the bite of betrayal, secrets, otherworldly contact, and dealing with loss.  While the story was interesting, I would recommend reading the first in the series to see how the events in Charleston (which I'm still a bit unclear on) lead Charlotte into opening her mind a bit more to the supernatural.

More books by Mara Purnhagen

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