About The Mediator

"I first got the idea for The Mediator series after my father died in 1994. My brother and I kept thinking we saw him out of the corners of our eyes. I know it was just a trick of our subconscious, but it did seem a little like Dad--who had a good sense of humor, and played a lot of pranks--was haunting us, in a joking way. That got me thinking--what if there WERE such a thing as ghosts? And what if, instead of just the ghost of someone YOU happened to know and love, you were someone who could see EVERYONE's ghost?

When I mentioned this to my brother, he groaned, 'You're not going to write a book about this, are you?' I started writing one that day--a book that eventually became SHADOWLAND, the first book in The Mediator series, about a sixteen year old girl who can see and speak to ghosts (only no one in her family knows this) and who moves, with her mother, from Brooklyn to live her new stepfather and brothers in California, where she encounters Jesse, a spirit like no other--and to whom she later proves to be bound by destiny, whether she likes him or not.

And she definitely does." --Meg Cabot, author of The Mediator

The Mediator is a series of six novels written by Meg Cabot and published between 2000 and 2004. The series was originally published as four novels under her pseudonym Jenny Carroll, by Simon and Schuster. It was reprinted under HarperCollins as Meg Cabot, with the two more books published as well. Meg is currently working on a seventh installment to the series; you can learn more here!

The series is about a girl named Susannah Simon, a.k.a. Suze, who is a mediator, which means she can see and talk to ghosts and when necessary, hurt them. Suze spends a lot of time directing the usually unhappy dead to the afterlife. However, her job is not easy, as not all ghosts want to be guided. Everyday she is haunted by the fact that they will not leave her alone until she helps them resolve their unfinished business with the living.

The story begins when Suze moves from New York to Carmel, California when her mother remarries. Along with a new stepfather, Suze acquires three stepbrothers (whom she nicknames after the Seven Dwarfs: Jake becomes Sleepy, Brad becomes Dopey, and David becomes Doc) and a new home in a century-and-a-half-old house that formerly served as a boardinghouse. When she arrives at her new home, she finds the ghost of Jesse, who was murdered at the boardinghouse in 1850, "living" in her bedroom.

The series follows Suze's adventures in mediation, during which she encounters many vengeful ghosts and is helped (or hindered) by other mediators, such as Father Dominic, the principal of her new high school, and Paul Slater, a teenage mediator with dubious intentions.

Learn more about The Mediator at Meg Cabot's Official Site.