Deep and Dark and Dangerous

Gr 5–8—One rainy afternoon, 13-year-old Ali finds a photograph of her mother and aunt taken when they were children. It's torn, revealing only the shoulder of a mysterious third person; the name on the back reveals only the letter "T." Ali's mother refuses to talk about the photo or her summers at the lake in Maine. Ali goes to spend the summer at her aunt's Dulcie's lakeside home to babysit her four-year-old cousin, Emma. She enjoys her time there until a young girl named Sissy appears at the beach. Sissy immediately befriends Emma, but is quite rude to Ali. Sissy claims to know something about what happened to a girl named Teresa at the lake 30 years ago. While Ali doesn't trust her, she's intrigued and begins investigating. This is a slow building, but increasingly chilling ghost story (Clarion, 2007) as Sissy's erratic behavior coupled with Emma's need to please her leads to a couple of scary situations. Rachel Dulude's narration, which is told from Ali's point of view, captures the eerie atmosphere of the mystery, but would have benefited from a more emotional reading at times. Young listeners should be sufficiently spooked by the plot twists.—Elizabeth Elsbree, Aurora Public Library, IL