It’s her final year at Shadow School, and Cordelia Liu isn’t ready to move on. Which is funny, considering helping ghosts “move on” is sort of her thing. But Cordelia can’t bear to give up the rare ability to see and help ghosts.
A field trip brings Cordelia, Benji, and Agnes face-to-face with a dangerous phantom – a ghost capable of reanimating dead animals – and a team of professional ghost hunters that disappear right after they capture the phantom. Cordelia can’t help herself – she needs to know more about the ghost hunters and the phantom.
It’ll mean getting Agnes and Benji to join her and the ghost hunters at a strange village called Shady Rest, where ghosts live peacefully in their own homes. But soon, Cordelia, Benji, and Agnes realize that Shady Rest is not quite what it seems. Ghosts are disappearing from their homes. Others start to glow and grow frighteningly long necks and extra teeth. And some of them look strangely familiar. Didn’t they save these ghosts already?
I didn’t like how the story starts out. Instead of starting in September at the beginning of the school year, the reader is dropped headfirst in January, and the school year is half over. I thought that was a weird starting point.
Luckily, the author makes up for the weird beginning by making the rest of the story awesome! There are a few slow parts, but it makes the fast-paced parts even better. There are so many awesome phantom chaos scenes, and each phantom has its own different chaotic power. It’s creatively creepy, which is my favorite kind of creepy.
There is obviously something shady going on at Shady Rest; it’s in the name for one thing. The question is what exactly. I had one theory that they were using the ghosts as an energy source. I was wrong, but I still liked the idea, evil plot-wise.
As the Shadow School trilogy comes to an end, we, the readers, are left with, in my opinion, one of the most satisfying finales I have ever seen. It was like the Phineas and Ferb series finale episode ‘Last Day of Summer’ when Phineas waved goodbye to the audience. I’m sad to see the story end, but I’m happy that I got to spend time in this unique world of ghosts and phantoms.