“I instinctively have to get away from you. Bye.”

67. Walk of the Spirits & 68. Shadow Mirror – Richie Tankersley Cusick

Apparently these are the last two novels Richie Tankersley Cusick has published via a major publisher according to at least a few of sources. It was clear to me at the end of Shadow Mirror that might not have been intended to be the case. The thing is, she writes about the ghostly encounters of teens in a small Louisiana town with authorita. And that makes sense, she was born in New Orleans, the only place I’ve been where the signs about apartment vacancies mention whether or not the place is haunted publicly. It’s a Spirit Walk kind of state. And Cusick makes a clear differentiation between the southernness of Florida (where main character Miranda is from) and the southernness of bayou-adjacent Louisiana where both books are set, which makes more sense than anyone who would like to lump all the southern states together would understand, including the person I currently know who seems to think no areas of Florida have grass or snakes. They seemed so delusionally sure of what they were saying.

Anyway, Miranda and her mother move to the tiny town of St. Yvette after a hurricane takes their Florida home away. Miranda’s mom is from St. Yvette but she doesn’t like to talk about it because her father, Jonas Hayes, is the town crackpot. So she kept him from knowing his granddaughter – and she tries to keep Miranda from meeting him by having the both of them live above the garage at Hayes House, where her grandfather lives with the massively popular Aunt Teeta.

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Pammy was also massively popular, but not for her cooking and welcoming personality like Aunt Teeta.

Not unlike a vampire series which shall not be named (not the ridiculous Derek the vampire one), Miranda finds an immediate friend group at school by being awkward and silent. Granted, she’s silent because she’s dealing with losing everything she ever had due to a hurricane, but, still. And this friend group is very eclectic and its cobbled-together nature is explained with familial ties. There’s Ashley, the bubbliest of cheerleaders, Parker – her sullenly willful boyfriend who is on the football team and rich, Roo – Ashley’s super-goth sister by marriage, Gage – the one with the dimples who lived next door to Roo and Ashley starting in childhood and who Roo is clearly in love with despite all her disaffected bullshit, and Etienne – who sounds exactly like every Cajun I’ve ever run into and is Gage’s cousin and who is much beloved of Miranda’s Aunt Teeta and grandfather.

One class history project brings them all together and they end up in a beautifully described dilapidated Union soldier cemetery and they meet Miranda’s grandfather being all crackpot-style and then he collapses and only gets to say like a couple sentences to Miranda before he dies. Sheesh.

And then there’s the ghosts. And Etienne showing up at all the right times when Miranda is ready to complain about seeing said ghosts and having a new important thing in her life that’s scary after losing all the other things and pushing him away, but wanting him to stay.

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Pammy and Thaddeus’ dramatic recreation of Etienne sneaking into Miranda’s bedroom once she and her mother move into the larger Hayes House.

Somehow, the eclectic band of misfit friends who are all cute and constantly give each other hormonally-based shit manage to be interested – except Parker, who has an even bigger secret than his parents being rich and neglectful – in helping Miranda solve ghost problems, which happens to be what drove her grandfather to look like a crackpot. And they still manage to turn the history project in on time! With students who give a shit about their grades like Ashley and Gage involved, though, that was a given. Someone actually has to do the project while Miranda’s passed out, Etienne’s working offsite, Roo’s smoking, and Parker’s becoming a teen alcoholic. For the most part, the personalities of the teens are very realistic. Miranda’s a bit of a cipher and she does that Cusick thing where she runs from getting useful information a lot, but main characters are never perfect and she of course inexplicably attracts the attention of both Gage and Etienne. To be fair, attracting two southern dudes at the same time (while running from information) is also kind of a Cusick thing, I read Blood Roots.

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Pammy was perfect, but, she was a guinea pig, so…a very high bar had already been met.

In book two, the last book thus far of the Spirit Walk series, the cracks in those friendships widen – and it’s all Miranda’s fault with all her fainting and ghost shenanigans, now at a giant plantation. One thing I will mention about this series, it throws in tidbits of southern history in a not beating you over the head with self-righteousness way to remind you it was bad. Everyone is aware it was bad and that “bad” isn’t really a big enough word to cover it. There is a level of living with the history of a place and remembering that more than one culture was there, but also there’s the architecture appreciation because now the ghosts are giving Miranda shit through mirrors at the plantation Belle Chandelle. And they are super sad. And they are pre-Civil War ghosts. Who come with smells at the plantation currently being turned into a bed and breakfast. The whole place, regardless of whether or not that is in quite poor taste.

And Etienne is even more preternaturally aware of when Miranda needs him to sneak in to her room and comfort her about ghosts.

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Thaddeus was just like Etienne, apparently surveilling the house while also working like ten outside jobs. Thaddeus didn’t have to do quite as much work to watch out for Pammy.

Anyway, those friendships. Ashley might stop dating Parker, even though this doesn’t entirely go anywhere, it does make them upset and distracted. Roo is still trying to act like she cares more about making pithy innuendos than she does being with Gage, because Gage and Miranda clearly have some level of attraction to each other. Gage does research and is clearly cute, but, Miranda has Etienne after her too, and he’s kissed her and won’t quite holding onto her just a little too tightly when she’s upset or trying not to be embarrassed. And somehow, her sieve of a personality reminds Etienne’s mom of herself, so she gets invited to dinner at their house in the bayou.

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I don’t know, maybe they like each other. Maybe. A little bit.

One swamp tour later, they know each other even better than all those secret meetings and shared glances – and then it’s gone because Gage shows up and interrupts dinner and he and Etienne get all angry at each other because they both care about Miranda. Miranda once again gets awkward and then relies on everyone else to save her after she tries to fix the ghost things by herself. She’s not exactly a slayer, we’ll just say that. And she doesn’t seem to know that Etienne is way more interesting than Gage even if he has been previously popular with the ladies…ladies we never hear about because the outside characters who are mentioned are either ghosts or impeding on Ashley and Parker’s relationship.

However, in the end, they can all stay friends for now as long as they have to save Miranda and feelings that were hurt can stay hurt and no one will ever find out how it shakes out because that’s the last book. They were all probably going to break up and be pulled inexplicably back together as a friend group over some ghost friends who didn’t get to go to cotillion or something in the next one.

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I don’t know, maybe these two crazy pigs who never betrayed each other are still watching over each other as ghosts, waiting for more series books their sweet little antics can be applied to.