EricaO

I can't figure out for whom this book is written, audience-wise. The solitary subject on the CIP page is Women's fiction but this is a story about a 10-year-old girl and her best friend who experience death and guilt, who test the boundaries of their friendship, and who unravel a mystery one summer. Also, there's an element of the supernatural in that Mary, the girl in question, holds seances and calls up ghosts.
It's written in the voice of an adult remembering childhood and trying to simplify the memories in order to recapture the feeling at the time, but it misses its mark. I wonder if kids would feel they were being talked-down-to when reading this? That's what makes me wonder if it's really supposed to be read by adults. I don't think it falls in the YA category, which would actually simplify things for my job because I could place it between JF and adult.

The story, itself, would probably be more enjoyable for the 8-12 set. It's just violent enough, suspenseful enough, and adventurey enough to be appealing but without any real adult situations or overtones. However, like I said before, the writing style could hamper the reading enjoyment; to me, it smacked of "kids aren't smart enough to get or convey the subtle nuances going on, so I am going to spell this out very carefully" writing.
It's a short book, but wordy. There's a lot of needless repetition among paragraphs and the first chapter is really long (24 pages out of a 124-page story with 12 chapters and an epilogue)

The writing is technically sound and the story flows in a forward direction. The main characters, while nothing new, seem to stay true to themselves throughout, though some of the minor characters are a little confusing or oddly-written. I think if this were tidied-up and aimed at a younger audience, it would be quite enjoyable not only for that audience but for their parents, as well. It could be a good read-together-and-discuss book, since it espouses some great values for children (trust yourself and your instincts, be aware of your surroundings, stupid decisions can have horrible consequences, etc)