Vol. 93: Chasing that childhood summer reading high

In my first ever newsletter, I wrote that I’d acquired via Ebay a collection of mass market paperbacks of Meg Cabot’s The Mediator series in its entirety*, a series I read as a young person and intended to reread. Well, 4 years and 92 newsletter editions later, I have completed my reread!

I started my reread in 2021 and shared some thoughts on my IG stories along the way. I read books 1 - 4 and then stopped. As someone committed to reading diversely, I’m constantly auditing my recent reads on StoryGraph to ensure I’m not reading too many white people in a row. Because Meg Cabot is white, this slowed down the reread - I wasn’t reading them back to back and must’ve eventually gotten distracted.

Earlier this year, I fell into a reading binge of S.A. Cosby. There was a string of days in early May where seemingly all I did was sit outside on the terrace of my new apartment immersed in Cosby’s dark and twisted worlds; when I finished, I’d walk to the library for his next book and start that immediately. Something about the act of going to the library to get the next book by an author I’m falling in love with felt so deliciously childhood summertime that I was left craving more. Thus, The Mediator reread. I read the whole series - 6 books - in the month of July.

The Mediator is Meg Cabot’s series following Susannah “Suze” Simon, a feisty, stylish, and hilarious hot mess teen girl who has just moved cross country from her hometown of Brooklyn to Carmel, California after her mom meets and falls in love with her new stepdad, Andy. She moves in with Andy and his three sons that Suze not-so-affectionately refers to as Dopey, Sleepy and Doc, in a recently renovated home that used to be an 1850s boarding house. She is instantly panicked upon learning that her home is an old building. Why? To speak in Suze’s spunk, “I’m a typical sixteen year old girl - except oh yeah, I can speak to the dead.”

Upon her move and her enrollment at the private Catholic Juniper Serra Mission Academy, Suze discovers that her school’s principal, Father Dominic, is also a Mediator. She meets an 1850’s “hottie,” Jesse, who has been haunting her bedroom since he was murdered in the boardinghouse 150 years prior. The series starts out as a procedural, with each book featuring a new ghost or group of ghosts that Suze must mediate all while navigating her crush on her ghostly roommate, her newfound popularity at school, and keeping her Mediating a secret from her family and friends. Later in the series, it became less one ghost per book model and more an overarching plot with a nasty boy named Paul Slater (I’m trying my best to leave this spoiler free even though the series is 20 years old).

My sister, 2 years my senior, is the science fiction and fantasy reader between us. I told her I was rereading the series assuming that I must’ve picked it up after her. Turns out, she’d never read it. I’ve written before about how my taste in music from my youth is so random. The same could be said about the books I read; they ended up in my hands by chance. Cabot is perhaps most known for The Princess Diaries, and while I saw the movie as a kid, I never read the book. She was prolific, and each time I talk about the Mediator with female friends of my generation, they mention a different series or book of hers that they loved.

I plucked Suze off the library shelves from the teen room on the first floor of the downtown Ann Arbor District Library. The teen room was usually empty, only me and my sister, occasionally a couple friends whispering over schoolbooks at the high top in front of the window. It had 4 fiction shelves but felt endless. Maybe I discovered The Mediator from an end cap, placed there by a librarian picturing an awkward teen reading about this bold girl with magical powers.

It’s very clear in my reread why I enjoyed the series: I love a spunky teen girl taking on the world. Think Veronica Mars or the novel I wrote my college application essay on, The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks.

The Mediator is so delightfully early 2000s: Suze bemoans that she’s the only one of her friends without a cell phone. She wears her black leather jacket and her stepbrother asks her if she was in a gang in Brooklyn. She has to wear pleated shorts for her work outfit and is terrified her butt looks big. She is obsessed with outlet shopping. Meg Cabot is constantly dropping labels and describing Suze’s adorable outfits: her Prada slides, her J Crew slip dress, her Stuart Weitzmans and Steve Maddens and on.

For the most part, the books hold up. The first book includes a slur against Native women - it’s a word that is unfortunately still somewhat common as people aren’t aware of its status as a slur. The first book also features an awful representation of suicide - SPOILER ALERT think, a ghost of a girl who committed suicide because she got dumped SPOILER ALERT OVER - to the extent that if you’ve lost someone by suicide, I don’t know that I’d recommend it. One of her brothers says homophobic slurs but it’s generally recognized that he is shitty for saying it. Her best friend from Brooklyn Gina, who visits in book three, is Black and they may have referred to her as a Nubian princess or something of the sort once or twice. There’s some light diet culture. The largest issue of Jesse and Suze’s age gap - she’s 16; he died in his early 20s 150 years ago - was unaddressed for the whole series until finally, at the very end, the resolution leaves us with a less than ideal message for 16 year olds. Similar to the slur, it’s another area where the book falls short but while our current culture has made progress in recognizing predatory age gaps between teen girls and older men since 2004, there’s still work to be done. Overall, I was pleasantly surprised for a series that’s old enough to drink.

I’d love to know what a young person reading them today would think. Y2K fashion is in again! They’d love her outfits as much as I do without a doubt. Suze’s voice is absolutely hilarious to me but I wonder if she’d be considered millennial cringe???

I had so much fun rereading books 1 - 4; since I read them last in 2021, I generally remembered all the drama that ensues. The last 2 books were the ones I was least familiar with; the final book was also hardest to get through. Particularly in the first half, Suze really goes boy crazy. She stresses about her relationship with Jesse without actually speaking to him. Meg Cabot introduces more functions of being a Mediator that Suze previously didn’t know about and while she grapples with those implications, I got a bit bored and tired of her whining. Maybe it would have worked if she had a soul she was trying to save throughout this but she doesn’t. Then, about two thirds in, there’s a series of wildly dramatic scenes that pave the way for an overall cleaned up and satisfactory ending to the question of the whole Suze is in love with a ghost thing.

Do series get canceled by publishers the way network TV series do? Or does an author just decide not to write them anymore? We wrap up in Suze’s junior year, so she could have gotten a senior year before going off to college.

My reading life this year - truthfully, the past few years - has been slippery. I read one good book but then instead of picking up another, fall into binging a mediocre television show for the umpteenth time. I spend hours on social media when I could be reading scrolling between restaurant recommendations, TJ Maxx hauls, and the most upsetting shit you’ve ever seen about conditions in the “Alligator Alcatraz” concentration camp in Florida or starvation in Gaza - things that, to be clear, we must be informed on, but aren’t meant for us to consume when swiping between OOTDs. I’m having a hard time sitting still. I really miss nonfiction. My focus just hasn’t had it. 

Returning to my reading roots has been so deeply gratifying. Suze made it silly, fun, and unserious. There was one scene where Jesse (ghost) gets in a fight with another living Mediator, a hot new boy at Suze’s school, while her brothers are throwing a kegger. They roll down the stairs, punching each other in the face, then crash into a china cabinet before shattering the glass door to the patio, landing in the hot tub where Jesse attempts to drown the bad Mediator by holding his head underwater. Suze is simultaneously narrating what she is seeing and describing what the drunk teens at the party are seeing - namely, the hot new boy all bloody, rolling down the stairs, punching air, crashing into a china cabinet, then dunking his head under water while thrashing about. I was LAUGHING OUT LOUD.

So tell me: How do you nurture childlike wonder in your reading life? Will my reading life ever get back to where it was in 2019?

*As I close out, for my fellow Suze hive: did you know? In doing my research for this newsletter, I learned something: in 2016, Meg Cabot put out an adult sequel to the Mediator series titled Remembrance. And even better, it’s currently on the shelves of my local library. I can’t wait!

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