Beyond

August 1, 2012
Jane's shadow having its own spirit is odd enough. Now it has a death wish. Born without a pulse, Jane is no stranger to near-death experiences. Her shadow has forced her to drink drain cleaner and held her down on a train track as a speeding train approached. After a recent nail-gun "accident" to the skull causes her to flat-line, Jane returns to the living with her shadow even more determined to kill her. The first-person narration makes the teen's fear immediate, as she begins sleepwalking along dangerous roads and dreaming of being buried alive. The atmospheric setting--the dark, wet, small town of Edgewood, along Canada's Rain Coast--adds another layer of terror to this intriguing ghost story. When Jane discovers a human skeleton after a landslide, she starts to realize the true nature of her shadow. Certain her constable father and florist mother wouldn't believe her shadow stories, she entrusts best friend and "Creep Sister" Lexi, a budding cinematographer with an interest in film noir, to help her solve the mystery. As in Acceleration (2003) and Bonechiller (2008), McNamee delivers another taut, spine-tingling page turner. A return to the true ghost story without any supernatural romance to ruin it. (Ghost story. 13 & up)

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October 1, 2012

Gr 7 Up-Jane has a lot of experience with death. She was born dead, heart not beating when she entered the world. Doctors saved her but she has had several other close calls. Is she accident prone, suicidal, or just plain crazy? Her brushes with death have been explained away as "accidents." But no one really believes that. If she tells her parents or her doctors what's really going on, they'll think she's insane and lock her up in a padded room. Only her best friend and fellow "creep sister," Lexi, knows the truth, that each accident was caused by her shadow taking over her body and trying to kill her. The latest incident, a nail gun to the head, almost did her in and seems to have given her shadow even more power. Now she is sleepwalking and human remains have been found in the woods near her home. Can Jane and Lexi put all of the pieces together before the shadow finally succeeds? Creepy and exciting in equal parts.-Anthony C. Doyle, Livingston High School Library, CA

Copyright 2012 School Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

September 15, 2012
Grades 7-10 Jane is a beacon for disaster. By age 17 she has swallowed drain cleaner, suffered 10,000 volts of electricity, and almost been flattened by a train. But it is the nail gun to the head that officially killed heruntil the doctors brought her back. Now the sudden, suicidal impulses that have plagued her otherwise happy life have a physical form: a shadowy being who claims to want her back. Some kids have imaginary friends, thinks Jane, maybe I had an imaginary assassin. Though there is probably only a short story's worth of plot here, Edgar Awardwinning McNamee gamely runs his characters through the full gauntlet, delivering decently spooky what's-that-noise and was-it-a-dream horror moments. McNamee is especially graceful at jumping from the past to the present and meting out information in a way that both deepens the mystery and establishes Jane as a nuanced character. With roughly a scare per chapter, this is a fine, jolting read, especially for reluctant readers.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)