Double O Stephen and the Ghostly Realm by Angela Ahn [MG Review]

Summary 💬

Stephen loves pirates. What he doesn’t love is his name: Stephen Oh-O’Driscoll. He believes when his Korean mother and Irish father gave him this name, that it was just one cruel setup for being teased. Giving things the proper name is important, which is why Stephen thinks that it’s time to update the definition of pirate. They’ve got a bad rep, and maybe they deserve some of it, but Stephen still likes a few pirate traditions, like bandannas and eyepatches — he’s just not that into stealing things from people. He has the perfect new word: piventurate. A sailor who passionately seeks adventure. That’s what he wants to be.

When he gets suspended from school for doing proper piventurate-in-training things (using sticks to practice sword fighting), his mother doesn’t let him sit around doing nothing, instead she takes him to a museum. At the museum everything changes. Stephen finds himself in a strange new place, face-to-face with a real pirate. A pirate ghost.

Captain Sapperton needs Stephen’s help to cross to the other side, and his former ghost crew are intent on making sure Stephen follows through, whatever it takes. Stephen is about to discover the true meaning of piventurate, and much to his surprise, his adventure will not only take him farther into the ghostly realm, but also closer to home, where long-held family secrets reveal surprising ties to the spirit world.

Goodreads

Review ✍🏻

Having splashed into Canadian middle grade with a pair of realistic novels, Angela Ahn’s third title dives into speculative fiction. Pirates and ghosts? Sign me up. Double O Stephen and the Ghostly Realm follows lively Stephen Oh-O’Driscoll as he discovers he can communicate with ghosts – one of whom may have been a pirate and needs Stephen’s help crossing over.

Pirates and Ghosts?

Ghosts feature more prominently than pirates, with few archetypal pirates/ pirate-like deeds taking place. Pirating – or more accurately, piventurating – plays more of a philosophical role as an approach to life that Stephen and his best friend Brandon have adopted. When I first read the blurb, I anticipated Stephen entering the ghostly realm and setting sail with a crew of ghost pirates. That does not happen (but some sailing does take place!)

PIVENTURATE. That’s a word I made up myself. […] Piventurates are sailors who passionately seek adventure. People who boldly travel into the unknown to explore and learn.

2%

Family Dynamic

The story stagnates a bit early on as Stephen stumbles into the ghostly realm. Not much happens apart from exposition via dialogue. It picks back up after Stephen returns to the living and finds his mom knew where he was the entire time. Stephen’s mom was an unexpected stand out character of this book for me. Stephen, of course, is a delight to read about, with his vibrant energy and enthusiasm and thoughtfulness for his friends. But I’ve always appreciated fully-realized adult characters in my middle grade novels (even when I was 10 years old).

She’s not one of those incredibly warm and supportive middle grade mothers. She has to work through her rejection of her abilities as a mudang and how she’s going to help Stephen navigate his own abilities. She’s extremely down to earth, pragmatic and realistically flawed. For example, she doesn’t hide her disdain for Stephen’s dad (her ex-husband) but she’s not so toxic towards him that it hurts Stephen’s relationship with his parents. Stephen himself is well aware his dad isn’t an exemplar father. Stephen happily accepts “bribe gifts” when Dad cancels their weekend together. I haven’t seen this dynamic portrayed much in middle grade. Often, a protagonist with divorced parents is suffering from that separation. In this story, the divorce happened three years ago. Stephen is mostly comfortable with his relationship with his parents now, even if it’s not perfect.

“The power of remembering who you really are,” Mom said softly as she watched everything unfold with very little expression on her face. “I should have known.”

80%

The Bottom Line 💭

Double O Stephen and the Ghostly Realm may have fallen short of my hopes for speculative fiction that invokes pirates and ghosts, but the characters of Stephen, his mom, and his halmeoni all make this a great read for fans of ghostly interactions or multigenerational stories.

Further Reading 📰

🍂 Read an excerpt
🍂 Author website
🍂 Reviews: Kirkus
🍂 Related: For more middle grade about communing with ghosts, check out William Alexander’s A Properly Unhaunted Place and Ellen Oh’s Spirit Hunters.

Would you rather set sail with pirates or help ghosts pass over to the other side?