Having read and reviewed a few books from Brick Cave Media, it's about time I tackled one by the matriarch of that publishing company, Sharon Skinner. I've read a few of her books, both adult and YA, but long enough ago that I wasn't reviewing books yet. This is very much a YA read, which has a strong focus on a small number of characters and locations, so that the story can gradually grow as we learn more about Mirabella herself.

She's Mirabella Polidoro, she's twelve-years-old and she's moved with her mother into Great Aunt Clovinia's huge old house in Robertsville, because Clovinia has a condo down in Florida. That was a good way to hook me in, because I went through something acutely similar. I was also twelve when my father, a deputy headmaster, took a promotion to run a school of his own, so the family moved up from a town in Essex to a village in Yorkshire. South to north meant a strong culture clash. Also, twelve meant that I'd done my first year of grammar school in Essex before transferring to a new school for the second year, meaning that everyone had found their groups before I ever got there.

Mirabella certainly has trouble finding her place at Jeremiah Flesching Elementary; and when she does make a friend who invites her over for a sleepover, it doesn't turn out well. As a precocious girl, she's used to solving her own problems but she can't solve this one. It's easy to yell at her through the magic of books that she should tell an adult, her mother or a teacher, but that underestimates the impact of bullying on an already isolated child, especially as Mirabella has quite the history of conducting what she calls psychological experiments but others are likely to interpret as pranks.

I liked her independence, partly due to her obvious intelligence but also partly due to the fact that her father is gone—he left them but died soon afterwards—and she still blames her mother for all of it. It helps that her other pressing problem is one that adults couldn't and wouldn't help with in the slightest, so she has to use her independent spirit to figure that one out on her own too. If you hadn't guessed, it's the faded phantom of the title, because her new bedroom is haunted.

Mirabella's young enough to buy into the concept of a ghost without being immediately scared of it, though it doesn't do anything to scare her. It seems lost and in need of a guide, which is perfect for our heroine, because she's lonely enough to want to bond with it and inquisitive enough to find out who it is and why it's still here. That prompts research, initially from library books and then, as she starts to find answers, from people who might know. It's been a long time since I was a bookish child living in the middle of nowhere, but this all felt very right so I was with Mirabella throughout and her progress felt like my progress. That's good writing.

The most obvious flaw isn't really a flaw but might be perceived as one and that's the strong focus on so few people and places. The entire novel is told from Mirabella's perspective. Only she knows about the ghost and, even when she brings others into her research, they don't know why. That's a fair approach for a book this long. I actually liked how fleeting her mother is in the story, because it's how Mirabella would have perceived her. There's a good talk at one point, but it's the only one because her mum is off at work or just off the list of people Mirabella thinks about talking to.

But, given how much time we spend at her school, we only get to know one teacher and two fellow students, with them not particularly well. Flicking back through the pages, I do see a few further names but I'd forgotten them all by the time I turned the last page. That's just background noise. This makes some sense, because it illustrates just how isolated Mirabella is there. The people we think we should hear from most are her friends but she doesn't have any, beyond Erin and Stacy, who quickly show their true colours. However, she seems to make a connection with Mr. Klutter, a characterful teacher, and I'm not sure the same explanation applies.

The other flaw is one that I can easily look past because it's really not a big deal and it may well be highly appropriate for the actual target audience, who are a heck of a lot younger than I am. This is aimed at my grandkids, one of whom I'm pretty sure has read it, not their grandfather, who has to cast his memory a long way back to remember being in some of these situations, albeit not the ghost—our ghost Fred merely opened the door to the kitchen occasionally while we were eating in there; he never manifested visually.

Anyway, this flaw is the fact that absolutely everything works out in the end. Sure, each thread is wrapped up neatly in capable fashion and some of them do so with some palpable emotion, but it surely wouldn't have hurt to let something still need solving at the end of the book. I don't believe a sequel is needed but Mirabella will carry on living her life anyway and it almost feels like she has no need to try any more. Everything's just set and that feels a little cheap.

It's certainly only a minor quibble from a reader who has worked through the next dozen books in his own life story, each of which had their problems to solve, with more still extant. Maybe it works as a message of hope for the twelve year olds reading and finding something of themselves in the heroine. If she can come out of this set for life, then maybe they can too and that's certainly not a bad message to send through fiction.

It's been a while since I last read anything by Skinner, but this feels very different to 'The Healer's Legacy' and 'The Nelig Stones'. The former began a series, so we should expect it to have broader reach than this. The latter was a quest story with multiple leads. Both were good, but this one is a notch above, I think, because it restricts its scope so ruthlessly that it's able to do everything that it needs within a couple of hundred pages and change. And suddenly I think I want to dive into the non-existent and completely unnecessary sequel. ~~ Hal C F Astell