Book Review: Dead Spell by Belinda Frisch

CreateSpace, April 28, 2011 ISBN: 978-1461006633 Available: Digital and Kindle                 There’s no doubt about it: Ms. Frisch has talent. The reader can recognize it right from the beginning of Dead Spell, her debut novel about a violent, avenging spirit that torments two teenage girls. But, like a lot of independent authors who self-publish, the novel […]

Book Review: The Screaming Season by Nancy Holder

First Ward Trade Paperback, March 2011 ISBN: 978-1456546861 Available: New and used soft cover and in Nook and Kindle e-book formats. Nancy Holder’s Possessions series has been an unexpected personal favorite of mine. Her third installment, The Screaming Season, did not fail to disappoint. I wasn’t sure I could possibly enjoy the series anymore than I already did, […]

Book Review: Haunting Blue by RJ Sullivan

Damnation Books, 2010 ASIN: B004E9U7D8 Available: Trade paperback & multi-format e-book Ghosts are one of the overlooked monsters of the paranormal out there these days, likely because it’s hard to make a ghost sexy (I mean, without totally ripping off the movie Ghost.) Luckily, RJ Sullivan doesn’t even try. Haunting Blue is a fun little horror novel about […]

Book Review: The Other Side of Dark by Sarah Smith

Atheneum/ Simon Schuster, 2010 ISBN: 9781442402805 Available: New Hardcover and Kindle   Katie Mullins is a fifteen year old orphan who just wants to be normal. But Katie may never live a peaceful life because she sees ghosts everywhere, and she is compelled to draw portraits of their violent, often gruesome deaths. Living with her […]

Book Review: Three Quarters Dead by Richard Peck

Dial, October 28, 2010 ISBN: 978-0803734548 Available: New   In 1973, when Richard Peck was just starting out as a writer, Robert Cormier’s book The Chocolate War, in which a student seized control of his high school from adult authority figures and brutally bullied his peers, changed YA literature forever. Three Quarters Dead is Peck’s contemporary response to […]

Book Review: Bad Girls Don’t Die by Katie Alender

Bad Girls Don’t Die by Katie AlendeDisney Hyperion, 2009 ISBN: 9781423108764 Availability: New and Used      Alexis, a budding photographer and anti-popular-kids activist, lives in the oldest house in town. Like all old houses, this one has a long and strange history, and some very odd things begin to happen after a photo shoot in […]

Book Review: A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens, ill. by P. J. Lynch

Candlewick, 2006 ISBN-13: 9780763631208 Available: New and Used     “Marley was dead, to begin with”. Charles Dickens doesn’t waste words setting the tone of A Christmas Carol. The bleakness of Marley’s solitary death, and the bitter miserliness  of his partner, Ebenezer Scrooge soon establish a dark and lonely atmosphere that lends itself to haunting. Indeed, […]

Book Review: The Dare by Brett Williams

    Walking to school the day before Halloween, Davey and Dennis spot a cat hanging in front of the old, abandoned Bentley place.  Dennis tells Davey the story of how the Victorian house is said to be haunted after old man Bentley killed his family several years ago and that their ghosts still live […]

Review: ghostgirl by Tonya Hurley

Charlotte Usher is friendless. She wants to be noticed, but her classmates, including handsome, popular Damen Dylan, don’t know she’s alive. And then she chokes to death. Charlotte has unfinished business, though, and she ends up in Dead Ed with other teenage ghosts. She is sure that going to the Harvest Ball with Damen will […]