Given the premise of the Cassidy Blake series (girl with ghost hunter parents can see and gets into trouble with real ghosts), it should be no surprise that the next city to be the setting of an adventure would be New Orleans, LA, USA. Bridge of Souls is on the one hand, better than its immediate predecessor, but on the other, still has some of the same problems.
I should say that I do in fact realize this is middle grade fiction, and thus it is somewhat less complex in certain things. That said, there is virtually no character development for anyone, and that includes Cassidy. I also fail to understand even with the suspension of disbelief required of most fantasy how one could realistically a) take a cat on a filming tour in which you travel to another country (or in this case, another continent) each week with a cat who has hardly any role in the story, and I don’t understand why Grim keeps being brought up if he has nothing to do; I love cats, but give kitty something to do or a reason to be dragged literally all over the world! b) have parents who fail to realize that their 12 year old has supernatural abilities when you yourself are supposed experts in just that (and yes, I’m sure it’s an intentional irony, and one with much precedent in adolescent featuring stories, not limited to but including Danny Phantom) and c) have a main character who learns information about her world and how and why certain things are as they might be for her, but not have any sort of character growth or shifting. That’s not how tweens work really, not in fiction and not in real life, at least not for the most part.
At least the ghost story is halfway decent; Cassidy is being hunted by an Emissary of Death because she’s cheated Death, in both the figurative and literal sense. Death itself never shows up which is too bad since that would be interesting, but Cassidy has to figure out how to save both herself and Jacob while in an extremely haunted city. This series has the possibility of including so much historical ghost fact, and it goes there a little, but not nearly enough for my personal taste. The final confrontation and solution involves the sudden revelation of the Bridge of Souls, and this part was rushed. There wasn’t hardly any sort of foreshadowing, and that would have made things so much more suspenseful and interesting. I also liked that the guide figure who has something secret that’s relevant to Cassidy in some way, Lucas, is actually an interesting person, and actually has some personality, unlike a lot of the other characters.
I have read Ghost Squad which is aimed at a similar audience, and that one proves that you can in fact do some of things in middle grade fiction that are bothering me about Bridge of Souls, thus I would argue it’s not just me being old enough to be the parent of someone who is the original target audience of this series.