Gilda Joyce, Psychic Investigator (ISBN 0525473750)

These characters really have character - liked the story, too:
Gilda Joyce is a little odd but downright likeable. Inspired by Harriet the Spy (like I was at her age) Gilda has 'career' plans. But Harriet only inspired me to carry around a notebook. Gilda's been inspired to be a psychic investigator. While she likes to snoop, Gilda does not like to lie. In fact, she has an uncanny way of telling difficult truths in the nicest possible way. So when she lies to the class on the last day of school and says she's going to San Francisco to visit family over summer break - she decides that she should at least try to make that the truth. She writes to long-lost cousin Lester Splinter and gets an invite to SF. There she meets her cousin Juliet. Gilda and Juliet start as polar opposites but find some middle ground and soon come to enjoy each other's company. Gilda can't believe her luck when Juliet (and the Splinter mansion) provides her with the perfect psychic investigation to follow - what really happened to Juliet's Aunt Melanie? While the story is enjoyable it was the characters that made this book a must-read. Juliet was hard to like at first. But as we learned more about her, she became easier to like. I liked Gilda's quirkiness. I really enjoyed her heartwarming attachment to her typewriter as a way of showing how much she missed her father. Even though he died of cancer two years - Nick Joyce (Gilda's father) - was one of my favorite characters in this book. Gilda's love for him perforated so much of her life that you couldn't help but like him too. In summary - this was a fast-moving story, with great characters, good sub-plotting and a tight well-designed ending. I would recommend it mostly to girls in the middle school reading level. Boys may find the ghost-y/spooky aspect of the story interesting too. There's a good mystery here.

Weak lead character:
My problem with this book is that I do not like the main character - Gilda. She is a pathological liar. Her "hobby" is spying on people. She is cruel to people who love her, e.g., her mother. Aside from that, the book is funny.

very interesting book.:
Gilda Joyce is a not-so-ordinary 13 year old girl who lives in Michigan. As her dad died a year ago, his type writer was given to her to pursue her dream. She writes many stories and dreams of becoming a top selling author, but on the other hand, she wants to be a psychic investigator. Her interest in ghosts, spirits, and contacting the dead was only the first step to her adventure. Everyone in her class was going on a summer vacation, except her. Until she decided to contact a long lost relative named Lester Splinter who had a daughter, Gilda's age, named Juliet. She sent him a letter asking to come down there and got an accept a few weeks later. She walked up to The Splinter house noticing an eerie tower attached to the back of the house. A mystery started to unfold here. Gilda learned that Juilet's aunt had jumped from that window almost ten years ago and Juliet had recently seen her ghost which caused her to faint and fall down the stairs. Juliet and Gilda go on an adventure together to find the reason of Aunt Melissa's death and whether it was a suicide or a homocide. They performed seances and searced for the key to unlock the mysterious tower. When they finally found the key they went inside and discovered many paintings. Gilda left with the success of solving the mystery and making a new friend, Juliet.

Sparkling writing!:
Very entertaining & a fun read. The author did a great job with evoking scene & character details in the relatively short & fast-paced books in this series. The characters in this series have been given a lot of detail and some have eccentricities, however, I thought the writing and the characterizations were humorous, interesting, & intelligent instead of ridiculous, pretentious, and inane. Even the far-fetched plots are interesting enough; they are not run-of-the-mill nor too zany & ostentatious to bear. I have read a lot of books this year with horrible writing & pacing, and boring characterization...even with good plots. Allsion's writing is so good that a good plot would not even be needed. I also like that Gilda is not a character that is perfectly nice with good thoughts all the time (she is a good person, though, with good intentions in general). She does not act perfectly sweet all the time & does things to tease her mother, brother, & friends (not always nice) but that is normal human nature. The lying and "cruelty" to her mother that another reviwer wrote about should not put anyone off this book. I didn't see Gilda's treatment of her mother as even approaching cruel...like a normal person, she just gets snippy & pushes it with her mom even though she shouldn't. Very minor meanness. Another reviewer wrote that Gilda needs to learn the meaning of the words like "tact" and "boundaries". So true :) and I was also frustrated by her not-very-successful attempts to support Wendy in the Ghost Sonata book. However, Gilda is still growing up. Plus, it is a novel - to read for fun! I don't think that every book should have a main character that is mature and nice so that readers can emulate 100%. People are multi-dimensional.

Features a great lead female!:
Gilda Joyce: Psychic Investigator is written by Jennifer Allison follows 14-year old Gilda, a girl convinced she has psychic abilities and loves to people watch. She somewhat rudely invites herself to San Francisco to spend the summer at her mother's cousin Lester's home. Once there, she finds herself befriending Lester's daughter Juliet, also 14, and the two of them pair up to solve the mystery of Juliet's Aunt's death years ago. The girls spend their time in a house they believe is full of ghosts, try to figure out a way to get into the house's tower, and learn about each other as they go. Though they originally believed they were incredibly different, by the end they aren't so sure. Gilda Joyce was a great character, though some of the language was a bit "advanced" for some middle readers. Nothing horrible or disturbing, just mature. I would put this one at 10/12 and up. She has two additional books she is starring in, those being Gilda Joyce and the Ladies of the Lake and Gilda Joyce: The Ghost Sonata.