At the end of Alone, while the story wraps up nicely, we are left without knowing what really happened to the world Maddie lives in. Freeman could have left us with that, and it would have been fine, but when I saw that there was a follow up, I had to have it.
The story starts the same place Alone starts, but from the perspective of the people who made it onto the transport vans, including Ashanti, Maddie's sleepover buddy. We also meet Grandin, a country boy whose dad refused to get on the transport, Harmony, an aspiring journalist, and Teddy, who loves movies and film. These four are thrown together when the transports arrive at the "camps." As life settles down and time passes, and the people are still not told what existential threat the outside world is facing, these kids aim to get to the bottom of the mystery. When all was revealed, I found the answer to be completely plausible.
I did find it to be a little less compulsively readable than Alone, simply due to all the jumping around in formatting. Ashanti writes in verse, Harmony writes via letters to her aunt, and Teddy's sections read like a screenplay. A neat idea, but it made it a little harder to follow for me.
All in all, a very worthy follow-up to Alone with a satisfying and believable ending!
Nora's mom died in a tragic restaurant shooting at Nora's birthday dinner. Understandably, her father wants to wrap her up and protect her from everything now, and she's suffocating. On the one year anniversary, he takes her on a camping/hiking trip to try to get their minds off what happened a year ago. But suddenly, tragedy strikes again, separating Nora from her dad. Now she's alone in the Arizona desert. It's hard enough trying to live through wild animals, hunger, and dehydration, but the ghosts of her past also won't leave her alone. Can Nora find her dad, and the peace she craves? This is a well-written and tensely paced novel in verse that will be enjoyed by anyone who enjoys survival stories.
Eleanor is the new girl in a tiny town. Her past is sad, and not really something you want to share with potential new friends, but she's doing her best to fit in. Unfortunately matters only gets worse when she starts seeing creepy things that no one else sees... a grandfather clock that appears out of nowhere, a big dog with red eyes, and a bird made of bones. Eventually she realizes that her classmates Pip and Otto see these "wrong things" too, and they find themselves as unwitting participants in a very old mystery.
Violet’s new house has the space her growing family needs, but as soon as they move in, the house feels odd and lonely. Violet’s older sister Mia declares the attic room with the peeling yellow wallpaper to be “creepy,” so by default, that room becomes Violet’s. Violet is dealing with a lot of personal issues, including nervously starting middle school, and it doesn’t help when she gets sick the first week of school. When she’s finally able to return, she’s too tired for PE class, so she’s sent to study in the library. There she meets a boy named Will who regularly sits out PE due to health reasons. He’s researching ghosts and hauntings for a science credit, which Violet finds fascinating. She wants to help her new friend with his project, but her illness returns and she isn’t getting better. Visits to multiple doctors lead nowhere, and she ends up homebound in her attic room. The vines on the yellow wallpaper seem to be moving now, and she thinks she sees the shape of a girl trapped beneath them. She’s terrified, both of the girl, and her mysterious illness. Loosely based on Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s 1892 short story The Yellow Wallpaper, this is a story about a haunted house, but it’s also a fresh, modern look at unexplained health issues, post-Covid anxiety, changing friendships, and blended families.
by Diana Urban
Claire, Revya, and Mariana are strangers on their way to summer camp on a remote Maine island. When their boat driver drops them off, he directs them half a mile up a path to the Lake House, ensures them that they'll be greeted by the camp director, and leaves. When the girls reach the camp, they find to their horror that the house has recently burned down. It’s still smoking, and there are no signs of life. A run back to the dock reveals that the boat is long gone. There’s no cell service, there’s very little food, and they soon discover that whatever happened wasn’t an accident, which means they could be next. Part survival tale, part horror story, part coming-of-age tale–this book has a lot going for it. The action starts immediately, and doesn’t let up. The cast of characters is diverse and multi-faceted. Claire has crippling anxiety, Mariana is gifted at fixing cars and tinkering with machines, and Revya has a background in MMA fighting. Readers will enjoy watching these complex characters grow and change when confronted with unimaginable challenges. A plot twist takes the story in an unexpected direction, with plenty of nail-biting and chills-inducing moments.
Alva knows her father killed her mother years ago, but she doesn't know if he knows she knows... Not for sure, anyway. But she thinks he suspects, and she lives in fear of him finding out how much she hates him. She's 16 now, and she has a plan to escape. She has to be so careful to ensure her father doesn't suspect her plans. But Alva's about to learn something about her father, and her small Scottish village, that will change everything.
Claire's got problems. Her best friend has a new best friend, her big brother is a jerk, and her dad is trying to make ends meet by writing books about ghosts and giving ghost tours in a giant bus that takes tourists around Chicago. She hates that ghost bus. But when his assistant gets sick, he needs Claire to help pass out flyers and keep an eye on the tourists. On the bus, she catches a glimpse of a boy in old-fashioned clothes, soaking wet with haunting eyes. When she looks again, he's gone. Then strange things start happening at her house, like bathtubs overflowing and dresser drawers full of water. It's clear she's being haunted, but what does the ghost want from her? And why has he chosen Claire?
I just kept coming back to this wonderful middle grade mystery!
Fiona's sister Arden is a very talented figure skater. Arden's whole life, their parents have driven two hours to take her to intense practices and competitions, all in the hopes that she might have an Olympic and professional skating career. When their parents can't take the driving anymore, they uproot the whole family and move to Lost Lake, where the training center is. Fiona couldn't be less interested in Arden's skating, and is righteously indignant that she has to leave her present (friends, school) for Arden's future.
While the rest of the family goes to skate practice their first summer in Lost Lake, Fiona goes to the library. She finds a book with an enticing green cover, and gets involved in the story. One of the things I love about this book is that we (the readers) get to read the book as Fiona reads it, and we can see why she becomes so obsessed with it. When she realizes she can't take it home because she doesn't have a library card yet, she hides it, but the next day the book is gone. The librarian is all shifty when she asks about it, and the creepy little blond boy who's always in the library too seems to know something.
Where is the book? What's it really about? Will we, the readers, ever get to finish it along with Fiona?
Maddie has been able to see numbers on peoples' foreheads since she can remember, but until her father was killed in a police shootout, it didn't click to her or anyone else what those numbers meant. She's able to see the date people die, but she can't seem to do anything to change the outcome. Several years later, her devastated mom is an alcoholic, and has Maddie do "readings" for paying clients. She predicts the death of a client's son, and when that actually happens, the client calls the police. This leads Maddie on a nail-biting hunt for the killer.
I loved how when a new character was introduced, the author would put the death date in parenthesis after their name. It was interesting to think about what it would be like to have a skill/talent/curse like this.
I'm so sad this series is over! All the magic of the first book, with lots of wonderful new characters to love, and lots of references to our old friends, Mia and Uly. Just like the first, much of the suspense of this book comes from trying to guess who the storyteller is. This one was a wonderful and emotional reveal at the end that I won't soon forget.
