HAPPY PEOPLE DON'T LIVE HERE

A mother and daughter move into a haunted apartment complex in this debut novel by an acclaimed short story writer.

Ten-year-old Fern and her mother, Alice, are on the move again. They never stay in one place for long, for reasons Alice keeps mostly to herself. Homeschooled Fern subsists on girl-detective novels and fairy-house making, while Alice ekes out a living selling miniatures. Their new apartment in Pine Lake, Minnesota—in a precarious building that used to be a sanatorium—is full of eccentric characters: the building manager/taxidermist, the professor who specializes in the literature of the Middle Ages, the woman who works as a mermaid. And then there’s the one Fern calls “the Cursed Lady,” who never seems to leave her apartment at all. Fern and Alice’s problems are bigger than weird neighbors, though. The past Alice is running from seems to be catching up with her. Fern sees ghosts throughout the property and then, one day, stumbles across a body in a dumpster who looks suspiciously like the Cursed Lady. But the body seemingly vanishes before anyone else can witness it. Like her girl-detective heroes, Fern is determined to get to the bottom of this mystery, which entangles the supernatural with the melancholy living who are perpetually haunted by their histories. Sparks pays homage to children’s literature—and to children who don’t need the darkness scrubbed out of their fairy tales. (One of Fern and Alice’s pastimes is watching Jean Cocteau films together.) Like, say, Tim Burton or Neil Gaiman, Sparks works within a highly stylized mix of quirky and eerie—but from within her own idiosyncratic vision, she celebrates the power and strangeness of weird women and girls.

For anyone who has ever wished they made Nancy Drew novels for grown-ups.