Two upcoming middle grade ghost stories

Ghosts in Canada! Ghosts in Illinois!

Book covers: Danica dela Torre, Certified Sleuth, by Mikaela Lucido; Stage Fright, by Wendy Parris

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My name is Danica dela Torre and I’m the youngest sleuth in Renley Crow. I solve mysteries, find lost possessions, and most importantly, always find out who did what. I know, I know. With Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys, small town kid detectives might be a cliché at this point. But answering the unanswerable will always be a tough job.

—Danica dela Torre, Certified Sleuth, by Mikaela Lucido

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Danica dela Torre, Certified Sleuth, by Mikaela Lucido

Coming in late September from Annick Press—so, for those of us not in Canada, a Canadian import—this is the first in the The Unofficial Official Renley Crow Detective Club series. Which, as far as I’m concerned, is a pretty irresistible name for a club and a series.

Danica dela Torre and her best friend Jack have been solving mysteries in Renley Crow—mostly for their classmates, mostly on the playground, mostly paid in candy and snacks—since they were little. While she’s mostly pretty happy and content, she’s definitely struggling with some stuff:

• she and her older sister have been clashing more lately;

• as much as she loves living with her aunt in Canada, she wishes her parents were in the same country so that the family could all be together in person rather than checking in via Zoom, and if that isn’t possible, she wishes she at least fully understood why her parents can’t or won’t move to Canada;

• she’s starting to get the feeling that her identity as Renley Crow’s preeminent kid detective is a joke to everyone except her

Things come to a head on that last point when Kennedy Fang moves in across the street from Danica—in large part because he’s ALSO a kid detective. And even though he says he’d like her help with a case—he thinks his house is haunted—she can’t help but see him as as a threat, both to her business AND to her best friendship with Jack.

While this is geared a little older than Elana K. Arnold’s Just Harriet books and features, you know, ghosty business, the main characters share a lot of similarities, and I thought of Harriet again and again as I read. Both girls have the best of intentions but tend towards bossiness; both girls tend to forget about other peoples’ feelings when they’re focused on a goal; while being works in progress on the Being A Good Friend front, both girls have generous, sensitive hearts.

As in the Harriet books, readers will absolutely see Danica’s emotional and social pitfalls coming, but will 100% feel for her as they play out—even when they’re largely self-inflicted. Because she’s a kid, she’s learning, and figuring this stuff out can be painful:

I hide in the bathroom for the rest of recess, clamping my hand over my mouth to keep it all in. It’s too hard not being enough. It’s too hard dealing with this ghost. It’s too hard trying not to be bossy. Conclusion: I must not be very good. All evidence points to it.

She also has a lot of moments of feeling awkward and embarrassed and, again, the emotions are very real:

“How do you know all this about the house?” Kennedy laughs awkwardly, squinting at me. He does that a lot. This must be how it feels when I examine other people. It’s not fun to be judged. It’s why I prefer to do all the judging.

And woo boy, the sibling stuff—she’s two years younger than her sister—is on point:

“Grow up, Dani! Stop playing pretend,” she scoffs. “There is no agency. It’s just you poking around into other people’s business. Your little Sherlock Holmes thing was cute when you were seven. Now, it’s just embarrassing. You’re embarrassing.”

As an older sister, that moment was so real that it made me want to hide under a rock—when I read it, I shuddered, and my hope is that I never said anything that horrible and cutting to my Treasured Little Sis™. But adolescence is hard on everyone, and like Danica and Harriet, I was 100% imperfect—as opposed to now, hohoho (←OMG IN CASE THE HOHOHO DIDN’T TIP YOU OFF I’M JOKING)—so I’ll have to ask her and then abjectly apologize if she responds with a list of Teen Me’s Worst Hits.

It’s not a horror story. While the kids are understandably freaked out at first, ultimately the ghost is not a threatening, dangerous figure—it’s looking for the kids to pass a message along, and it chose them because their currently difficult friendship dynamics mirror similar dynamics from the ghost’s life. Lucido does a really nice job of teasing that out—of giving both Danica and Jack distinct emotional growth arcs—by showing the parallels between the past and the present without making them too samey.

It’s seeded with hints about things to come: they haven’t verbalized it, but Jack and Kennedy are clearly sweet on each other; the adults in Danica’s family—particularly her mother—are well aware of the existence of ghosts and the spirit world; and while the mystery is wrapped up, another little nugget is introduced right at the end, so I’m curious to see what the next installment will look like!

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More MG ghosts

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Adrenaline swooshed through her. “We sneak over to the Old Winter Playhouse tonight and have a real séance. We talk to Maddie’s ghost.”

For a moment, nobody reacted and her words hung in the air. Had she gone too far? Although that could be a good thing. Paige may pretend to like horror movies, but no way would she agree to possibly facing a real ghost. Paige would be the one to say no, and Avery would score points for her daring plan. No one could accuse her of being babyish again.

—Stage Fright, by Wendy Parris

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Stage Fright, by Wendy Parris

About a year ago, 13-year-old Avery moved from rural Illinois to Philadelphia. She’s struggled making friends in Philly, struggled to find her place, struggled to feel comfortable. So she’s over-the-moon excited to come back to Illinois to stay with her best friend Paige for a summer visit. She’s looking forward to hanging out with her old friends, to doing all the things they all used to do, to recapture that feeling of belonging.

But, of course, people and relationships don’t stay static, and it doesn’t take long for Avery to feel like her friends have very much moved on without her:

As the others poked fun at their former selves, tears stung Avery’s eyes. What was happening? The tree house was a wreck, apparently Jaylen had turned into a gym bro, and Tyler had gotten obsessed with gaming, and Paige wore makeup and liked Bethany Barnes. It was as though Avery had landed in a world of fun house mirrors—everything was almost like what she remembered but distorted and wrong.

So, desperate to recapture the magic of their childhood, despite her full-fledged status as a scaredy-cat, Avery suggests that they conduct a séance at the supposedly haunted theatre in town:

One summer night that year, when the actors had finished rehearsal for the final play of their first season, a tragic accident had occurred. The director’s nine-year-old daughter, Maddie, had climbed onto the catwalk high above the stage and fell to her death. The show was canceled. The theater shuttered. The building had stood vacant ever since, decaying bit by bit over the years.

One thing leads to another, the kids get locked in—obviously with no cell reception—and quickly realize, WHOOPS, THIS PLACE IS ACTUALLY HAUNTED, and DOUBLE WHOOPS, THIS GHOST IS PISSED.

It’s solid—familiar beats, executed well. Bonus points for featuring some possession business, which I always find skin-crawlingly creepy; minus points for the Salem connection, but that’s totally a Me Thing and not something that’s going to bug most readers. (I’m generally not a fan of storylines that cast the Witch Trials victims as bad guys, because those were state-sponsored murders and apparently in my mind it will almost always be TOO SOON to do that, especially as a mostly throw-away explanation for paranormal shenanigans. (YES, YES, I KNOW I TAKE THINGS TOO SERIOUSLY, I AM WHO I AM.))

So, nutshell: Not in my personal top tier, but when it pubs in mid-September, I’ll certainly be handing it to my young fans of Lindsay Currie.

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