Shadow Grave

Written by Marina Cohen

Roaring Brook Press

978-1-250-78300-4

288 pp.

Ages 8-12

May 2022

 

The trip to a New Hampshire bed-and-breakfast for twelve-year-old Arlo and his eight-year-old sister Lola with their mother for Thanksgiving is supposed to be a treat. With their father remarried with a new child and Mom dealing with health issues and Arlo managing anxiety, the family needs a break. And with money being an issue–they're driving Mom's old clunker of a car–everything is being done on a budget. But when something jumps into the road and they end up hitting a tree and totalling the car, their family trip takes an unexpected turn. 

The trio have no option but to seek help, especially as Mom's ankle may be broken and their one working cell phone cannot get a signal. Following the road that eventually becomes little more than a footpath, they reach the town of Livermore, an isolated community that almost feels deserted. In fact, when they finally get someone to open their door, the woman tells them, "You've come to the wrong place." (pg. 37) But Lovicia, with the urging of her young niece Hannah, lets them in and summons Doc Brown to tend to Arlo and Lola's mom. Everything's a little bit old-fashioned from the plaster cast Mom is given to the pot over a fire in the hearth but it's the lack of automobiles or phones that poses the greatest concern. And then Arlo hears some one say, "Leave now. While you still can." (pg. 46) With one last call to his Dad before their phone dies, the family is put up at the Samuels' B &B, a large mansion of Mr. Woodbridge Samuels, his young daughter Alice, and housekeeper Mrs. Hawthorn. They also meet all the community who join them for a Thanksgiving meal but, even though they are polite enough, Arlo feels the townspeople are somewhat reserved, perhaps even unwelcoming.

It was as though their warm smiles and formal manners hid their true feelings, like sweet perfume masks the stench of sweat. (pg. 87)

What their superficial politeness and old-fashioned natures hide is far more creepy than even Arlo and his family could anticipate, and whether or not they can get out of Livermore safely is part of the mystery of Shadow Grave.

Author Marina Cohen has always given us a little bit of creepy blended with the realism of family relationships, mental health, and more. With Shadow Grave, she again delivers us to a surreal world, this one the town of Livermore with its eerie inhabitants, time-frozen settings and dark unknowns, while integrating it with the familiar as Mom battles a life-threatening illness, Arlo struggles with his anxiety and the whole family is challenged with rebuilding after divorce. So while Marina Cohen has given us another solid middle-grade horror novel (check out my favourites The Inn Between, The Doll's Eye and Chasing the White Witch),  Shadow Grave has infused a story with ghost-like entities, monsters, and unknown dangers with the reality of a family's challenges, thereby also drawing in readers with the fears of every day life. She reminds us that some times the terrors we feel are both familiar and alien. 

Enter Livermore with caution. There are monsters of different kinds but, if you face them as Arlo does, with positive thoughts, trust and family, you may just get out alive.

You Were Never Here

Written by Kathleen Peacock

HarperTeen

978-0-06-300251-7

392 pp.

Ages 13+ 

October 2020

 

I used to think that once things broke, you couldn't put them back together, that the cracks would always be present and there was no point in trying. (pg. 388)

Seventeen year old Mary Catherine Montgomery a.k.a. Cat undoubtedly thinks of herself as broken, or at least not normal, and it has nothing to do with her physique, though she often deprecates herself for her wild red hair and chubbiness. What Cat can do, since puberty, is feel others' desires and fears when she has skin-to-skin contact. Consequently, she wears long sleeves as much as possible and avoids crowds and any chance of close contact with anyone. She's learned from experience how damaging it can be to reveal what she knows. The first time was with Riley Fraser, the boy next door to her Aunt Jet's in Montgomery Falls, New Brunswick. Now after another incident because of her gift, Cat is leaving her home in NYC and going to stay with her aunt. But things are much different now. Oh, she still has her gift, though she generally knows how to avoid its consequences. It's Riley. He's disappeared.

At her aunt's home, now a rooming house, Cat meets eighteen-year-old Aidan Porter, as well as his friends Chase, Joey and Skylar, and reconnects with Riley's older brother Noah who returned from university when his brother disappeared three months earlier. As Cat tries to fit in with her horror film-loving new acquaintances and piece together the bullying that Skylar is experiencing related to Riley, as well as help Noah learn what happened to his brother, Cat gets caught up in another incident when they discover the near-dead body of another student, Rachel Larsen.

In a thrilling YA novel of a suspicious disappearance, a supernatural gift and the natural need for acceptance and human contact, Kathleen Peacock sends us into the community of Montgomery Falls and into the heads of Cat and several others to recognize that,

Sometimes... people fear the things they want or want the things they fear. (pg. 154)

Discovering what happened to Riley is paramount in You Were Never Here but learning about Cat's ability and how that has impacted her relationships with Riley, her NYC friend Lacey, her father, and others is also relevant. Because of that power, Cat avoids getting close to people, including her own family, and can't trust herself to feel for anyone, worried that they might run out on her or accuse her of being a monster. How do you trust others when you can't trust yourself? Blending Cat's gift with regular teenage angst, a craving for friendship and a bit of romance, and a mystery or two to be solved, Kathleen Peacock has created a story teeming with emotions and tension, and reminds us what it takes to be human, and Cat most certainly is. She's bright, realistic, compassionate, and cautiously trusting, though not always of herself. She is not the monster but there is one around. And, as with any good mystery, the reveal is both unexpected and convincing.

The Doll's Eye

Written by Marina Cohen

Roaring Brook Press

978-1-62672-2040

208 pp.

Ages 8-12

February 2017

There’s a creepiness in the old house to which twelve-year-old Hadley Jackson and her mom, and mom’s new husband Ed Crenshaw and his six-year-old son Isaac have moved. 

A heaviness in the air seemed to press down on her.  And, despite the August heat, it was cold and clammy, like a years-unopened tomb. (pg. 2)

She even feels like she’s being watched, though it could simply be the doll’s eyeball she discovers beneath her bed.  But, with her mom giving the lion’s share of her attention to Isaac, a child with numerous food allergies, Hadley is feeling less than hospitable to Ed and Isaac.  When the girl discovers an old dollhouse, a replica of the actual house, with four carved dolls–a man, a woman, a little girl, and an older woman in the apartment over the garage– Hadley sees a perfect family, and wishes the same for herself.   But, as many a tale has taught us, you must be careful with wishes.

Though she still feels out of sorts–in fact, she’s feeling an odd numbness in her hand which is extending to other parts–Hadley meets a couple of individuals who make her start to feel at home: Gabe, a neighbour boy who knows everything about snakes and insects , and the elderly woman, Althea S. de Mone a.k.a. Granny, who lives over the garage.  Gabe comes over daily to play and take her on excursions into the ravine at the back and Granny invites her for tea and crumble and chats about the dolls which she admits to carving.

But things begin to get really strange when the people in her life begin to change as the dolls disappear and are replaced.  First, Ed and Isaac disappear like they’d never existed and all of Hadley’s mom’s attention is focused on her daughter.  Hadley knows it is related to her wish that Ed and Isaac had never come into her life and tries to make things right again but ends up with another more haunting scenario with a father she’d never known.  She knows it’s all tied to the doll’s eye and the dollhouse but making it right seems near impossible. 

Hadley barely made it to her bed before her knees gave out.  She lay for the longest time, thinking, rubbing her numb hands.  It was as though someone had wrinkled the fabric of reality, changing the pattern of its threads.  She closed her eyes.  Perhaps if she dozed off, she’d wake from the nightmare and things would be back to normal. (pg. 100)

As if.

In the subtle terror reminiscent of W.W. Jacob’s chilling short story "The Monkey’s Paw", Marina Cohen brings creepiness into making wishes and into a young girl’s desire for a perfect family.  Hadley is just a naïve young girl who thinks she knows what will make her life better, just like the young girl from the past whose reminiscences Marina Cohen includes throughout The Doll’s Eye. But, whether in the past or the present, the young girls in The Doll’s Eye make some selfish and poor choices that have impacts never imagined.

By implanting her story in the seemingly innocent entities of youth i.e., dolls and dollhouses, Marina Cohen will have young readers shocked when they enter the disturbing realm of horror. But I guess that’s what the genre is meant to do, frighten and disturb. Thankfully, it’s the right amount of fright for young readers, never too much or of the grotesque variety, and it will keep them edge-of-their-seats reading until the last page, never expecting the ending.  As a seasoned reader, I should have seen it coming, but I didn’t, and I expect younger readers won’t either, though they will be thrilled with Marina Cohen’s twisted take on making wishes and what a perfect family entails. But, more than anything, they will be beguiled with another offering by Marina Cohen to a genre rarely published for middle grade readers and a sensational and supernatural contribution at that.

The Inn Between

by Marina Cohen

Roaring Brook Press

978-1-62672-202-6

208 pp.

Ages 8-12

For release March 2016

Don’t be deceived by the gold and green turquoise lightness of the cover of The Inn Between.  The story is nothing but dark and I believe that Marina Cohen has achieved her goal of a Stephen King novel for middle grade readers.

Eleven-year-old Quinn Martin is travelling by car with her best friend Kara Cawston and Kara’s family–parents and older brother Josh–to the family’s new home in Santa Monica.  The two girls had been inseparable in Denver and the linking of their two woven frienship bracelets, which seems to intrigue the non-Norm man running Norm’s Diner, shows how close the two really are.  After a weird bright light in the desert accosts the family car, they stop at the Inn Between, a gorgeous old-fashioned hotel straddling the border between California and Nevada, that promises “We’ve been expecting you.” (pg. 28)

As beautiful as the hotel is, the people within are very strange (and this is an operative word for everything at the Inn Between) and oddly overly hospitable.  There’s the desk clerk Persephone, the elevator operator Sharon (for the elevaor they are not allowed to use) and the valet-doorman, Aides.  And the guests are just as odd. From old Mr. Mirabelli who tells Quinn “They’re going to pull the plug” (pg. 34) to the little girl with the singed doll and Rico the guy who’d partied a little too hard and had come for a rest.  Most scary though is a tall, unshaven man in a black and yellow ball cap whom Quinn notices pursuing them.

After the first night, Kara’s parents are gone, apparently with the van that had to be towed for servicing, and the three kids spend the time swimming, enjoying the food and just hanging out.  But Quinn’s mind is perpetually troubled with memories of her little sister Emma and the guilt she harbours about her, and smells and sounds at the hotel continue to play on these memories.

When Josh goes awol too, Quinn and Kara go in search of Emma, convinced the crying Quinn hears is her young sister who had gone missing.  But what they find starts Quinn realizing who the guests at the Inn Between really are and why they must escape, without Kara’s parents and Josh.

The Inn Between is a mermerizing read of creepiness and suspense with a healthy dose of action and psychological tension.  Young readers who never get enough of spine-chilling drama (and it is very limited in youngCanLit) will be pleasantly disturbed by the eerie story, unnerving setting, and sinister atmosphere of The Inn Between.  Marina Cohen has done it.  She has written a spooky–but ghost-free–story about a place you wouldn’t want to visit and wrapped it in a cosy hotel robe of mystery and unsettling thoughts, without completely terrifying young readers, though there are some frightening scenes.  Best of all, Marina Cohen has something to say about friendship and grief and guilt but does so in a wonderfully unique and  horrific narrative.

Dark Company: Book Launch (Toronto)

Award-winning Author

Natale Ghent

whose children's and YA books include

Against All Odds (HarperCollins, 2011)

The Odds Get Even (HarperCollins, 2010)

Gravity Brings Me Down (Doubleday Canada, 2009)

The Book of Living and Dying (HarperCollins, 2006)

will be launching 

her newest young adult book

Dark Company

Doubleday Canada

978-0-385667333

304 pp.

Ages 12+

on

Saturday March 28, 2015

8 p.m. - 12 a.m.

at

Junction Craft Brewing

90 Cawthra Avenue

Suite 101

(Keele-St.Clair area)

Toronto

See details here

Having not yet read Dark Company (though I have it on my to-be-read pile as I type this), I thought I'd share the synopsis from Penguin RandomHouse's website.  Tell me if this doesn't get you uncomfortably curious:

Natale Ghent brings us an engrossing fantasy set in the near-future about the war between two worlds and a girl pitted in the battle of good and evil. 

     Seventeen-year old Caddy is haunted by visions of global destruction. They come on like seizures, taking her to a desolate place where dispossessed souls struggle to be heard. It is one possible future--one she feels she must prevent. But in a world where food and money are scarce, and the struggle over resources between the continents is escalating toward war, Caddy has little hope. 

    When her father goes missing, she searches for him and is abducted into a cabalistic society called The Dreamers--visionaries who "dream" to sustain the light against the dark energies that threaten to take over the planet. Caddy is shepherded into the society by a high school classmate called Poe, and through him, uncovers long-hidden truths about herself and her father. 

    The situation darkens when Caddy learns that the dreamers are hunted and killed by an ancient order known as the Grey Men--a cult dedicated to eradicating the light to assist a demonic entity they call The Speaker. By killing the dreamers, the Grey Men open rifts in the light that allow The Speaker to seed evil and darkness on the earth plane with the ultimate goal of destroying the planet. Things become more complicated when Meg, a girl from Caddy's high school, who has been ushered into this other reality, clashes with Caddy to supress the forces of light and to try to win back Poe's heart.

    As she falls deeper and deeper into the world of the dreamers, Caddy discovers layers of deceit and treachery realizes it's up to her to find a way to overcome the dark and prevent the light from being extinguished forever. . .

Retrieved from Penguin Random House on March 9, 2015.