Guardian of the Dead gives a new perspective to the usual spiel of boarding schools, the outcast heroine and the hotch potch of supernatural elements. The story is set in New Zealand and the setting closely reflects the story and mythology contained within the pages of the book. It starts strong but somehow in the middle, it starts to lose its hold on the pace and the narrative and never regains it in quite the same way. The mythology is not inserted into the story as seamlessly as possible and while it is fascinating, the frequent breaks in the narrative to explain the local legends gains a lecture/academic quality that detracts from the story as a whole. Ellie Spencer is interesting – refreshing even but she doesn’t have any definitive delineating quality at the end. The relationships are dynamic and the interactions between the characters are well crafted but at the same time I felt a certain distance between them and myself as the reader. I couldn’t connect to them as I would have wanted to. However, when all is said and done, I did like better than some of the other books I have read so far. It took the same story, added a few other elements to it and set it in the rich historical and mythical culture of the Maori that has been little explored so far.
