The Girl in the Locked Room

June 1, 2018

Gr 4-6-Jules Aldridge has just moved with her mom and dad from Ohio to Virginia. Now a seventh grader, she can't count how many times she's moved; her Dad makes a living restoring old homes, which means the family often moves after each job. His latest task is restoring the spookiest house Jules has ever seen, Oak Hill. Almost immediately, Jules spies a strange shadow in the top floor window, as if someone is looking out at her. This cannot be possible; no one has a key to that room. When Jules experiences strange visions of a long-ago family that no one else can see, she knows Oak Hill must be haunted. Jules is fearful about discovering Oak Hill's secrets until she meets a new friend at the library, Maisie Sullivan. With Maisie's help, Jules uncovers the terrible secret of what happened many years ago. The house is haunted by a 10-year-old girl, Lily Bennett, who was left behind in 1889 when her parents were brutally murdered by thieves. Jules and Maisie must figure out a solution to Lily's horrible ghostly dilemma. Told in alternating chapters by Jules and Lily, the narrative is fast paced and engaging. The resolution is achieved quickly, but it will satisfy young readers. VERDICT An enthralling ghostly tale with a neat and tidy conclusion; a good choice for middle grade shelves.-Julie Shatterly, W. A. Bess Elementary School, Gastonia, NC

Copyright 2018 School Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

June 15, 2018
Can Jules solve the mystery of the ghostly girl in the third-floor window?Sixth-grader Jules is tired of moving every time her father, who specializes in restoring historic houses, gets a new job. The newest lands them just outside of Hillsborough, Virginia, living in an addition to a crumbling mansion called Oak Hill. While Dad starts to renovate from the ground up and Mom continue to draft her latest mystery novel, Jules is stuck in the middle of the woods with no friends. At first, she doesn't know she's being observed by a ghost girl who has forgotten her own name, but soon each begins seeing visions of the other. Something happened in the past that made the ghost girl lock herself in the third-floor room, and the event plays out again every night. With a new local friend, Jules researches what happened at Oak Hill. Can they actually make a difference in the ghost girl's afterlife? Edgar winner and ghost guru Hahn turns out a surprisingly unspooky history mystery, good for readers who aren't ready for her chilling Wait till Helen Comes. Jules and the ghost alternate chapters as focal characters; Jules' are in first person and the ghost's in an appropriately attenuated third. The menace is mostly in the past in this slightly shadowy, modern fantasy with an alternate-world spin that causes the tale to feel unresolved. The cast is white by default.A good tale to hand to readers not sure they can handle grisly ghosts. (Supernatural mystery. 7-11)

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July 30, 2018
In this spooky middle grade tale by Hahn (One for Sorrow), 12-year-old Jules is tired of being dragged from town to town with her novelist mother and her father, whose work restoring old houses keeps them on the road. Their latest move takes them to Virginia, where Jules encounters a menacing, long-abandoned house, Oak Hill. Readers will know before Jules does that her intuition about the home’s haunting is correct; alternating chapters focus on the title’s ghostly girl who, since her death more than a century before, has remained imprisoned in an upstairs bedroom. When Jules, long attuned to the paranormal, sees the girl’s apparition and hears her voice, she researches past residents of the home, learning that the ghost’s name is Lily. Maisie, a girl Jules meets at the library, tells stories of Oak Hill’s grisly history (a family murdered, a hiker missing), and the two set out to free Lily from the room’s confinement. Allusions to Diana Wynne Jones’s exploration of alternate worlds provide an intriguing dimension to the tale, though the resolution it portends is overly tidy. Hahn’s mystery offers an atmospheric setting, a child ghost, and eerie circumstances that never quite cross into horror. Ages 10–12.

August 1, 2018
Grades 3-6 Sixth-grader Jules is used to moving into old houses so her dad, who specializes in historical renovation, can restore them to their former glory. This time, she's worried their new old house, a crumbling Virginia mansion, is haunted. Though she's staying in a modern addition, she has visions of the past from the point of view of a girl named Lily. Nightly, Jules hears a ghostly reenactment of angry men storming the home and Lily barricading herself in a third-floor room, a room still blocked in the present day. In alternate chapters, a lonely unnamed ghost girl watches Jules from a third-floor window and longs for escape. With the help of a new neighborhood friend and the local library, Jules learns what happened to Lily and concocts a plan to help her move on, involving an underdeveloped but suitable alternate-worlds premise. With little conflict, an emphasis on friendship, and a happy ending for all, this gentle paranormal mystery is perfect for young readers who aren't ready for a scary ghost story.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)