WAIT TILL HELEN COMES

An unusually scary, well-crafted ghost fantasy. Twelve-year-old Molly, 10-year-old brother Michael, and their artist mother, Jean, move into an isolated renovated country-church with Jean's new husband, Dave, and his disturbed seven-year-old daughter, Heather, whose mother died four years earlier in a fire that almost claimed Heather, too. There is a graveyard on the property; in a twinkling, Heather is possessed by the ghost of Helen, a child who, with her mother and stepfather, died in a fire in 1880. Molly decides to save Heather: Helen is trying to lure her into the pond where two other children have drowned. Then Molly discovers Heather's secret—she accidentally set the fire that killed her mother—and gets her to tell Dave. Heather's health is thereby restored, and the stepfamily is healed, but not before the malevolent Helen does some damage. Helen's ghost finds peace only when her mother materializes and forgives her; Helen, too, had set a fatal fire. Exciting for children comfortable with the genre, but the ghost activity is serious and chilling, involving a sensitive, intelligent heroine who believes in ghosts and wonders about death and what happens after it.