In this lively middle-grade fantasy, Ebony Charmed thinks she is defective, and that all the other kids at her special middle school for mages have great powers but her.

Yet she is able to speak by sign language to some spirits in the local graveyard, and weird things keep happening to her. She thinks she’s at fault, especially as her parents have separated.

The only person who listens to her is her best bud Fleishman, but he doesn’t believe in magic. Until magic sweeps them both into a succession of scary situations.

The first half had a lot of promise, but was frustrating because the adults in Ebony’s life wouldn’t tell her what was going on for her own good, meanwhile she never did what she was told, so she kept running into more and more danger.

The magical forces around her wouldn’t answer her questions either, just repeated that she would know what to do when the time came. This made for frustrating reading, and it didn’t help that the book was rife with spelling, grammar, and punctuation errors, or that there was a lot of bigotry about fat people in the handling of the Headmistress, called Bat-Face by the kids.

In spite of all the language errors, the second half picked up in pacing, becoming one long action sequence. It didn’t always make sense, but it was full of scary figures and imaginative magic as Ebony meets famous figures from Norse mythology.

Altogether a fun read for kids; I suspect that middle-grade readers would go right along with Ebony being constantly told to behave, and to wait, and she’d understand later, and the adults making little sense. Middle grade life can sometimes seem like that in the real world.

The book comes to a partial resolution, leaving plenty of threads dangling for further adventures.

Copy courtesy of NetGalley