GHOST ROOM

A family moves into a new house with a dark past—and an apparition of a missing girl in its attic—in Schiecke’s YA thriller.

Jess Kierney is a studious and caring teenage girl from a warm family; dad always has pancakes waiting for breakfast, and her little brother, Ben, is more harmless than irritating. Still, she’s feeling apprehensive about their move to the bigger, more remote house at 274 Wicker Grove, even though her mom does her best to put all her negative “what-ifs” to rest. It doesn’t help that the attic is always mysteriously freezing or that Jess finds a beautiful yet creepy porcelain doll in the woods behind her new home. Worse yet are her nightmares, featuring the phantasmal image of a girl dressed just like the discarded doll (“Her skin was pale, the shade of death”). Mom thinks she watches too many scary movies, but Jess’ friends, Amy Diaz and Max Walsh, have heard stories about the house and its former owners’ missing daughter, Hannah Crawford. Believing Hannah needs their help, the empathetic Jess rallies her friends and enlists the aid of their goth classmate, Megan Pierce, a teenage ghost-aficionado, to try to bring the lost girl some peace. Not all is what it seems, however, and a much darker presence stands in their way. Schiecke sets her story in a bygone era: the early 1990s, a time before cell phones and social media, when schoolyard gossip was the go-to for information, not the internet (Jess dives into Hannah’s haunting between times spent listening to Pearl Jam or catching reruns of Unsolved Mysteries). This less-connected milieu helps build suspense, and though the narrative is never overly scary, there are more than a few unsettling moments and blood-soaked scenes. The book builds slowly to a final confrontation in the attic, but reveals too much too abruptly, involving characters who have gone largely unexplored. This undercuts the big twist, though an uncanny séance full of eerie imagery (like a black-oozing bookshelf) brings the ending back around.

An uneven but still spine-tingling young adult adventure.