Eleven-year-old Allie has the life of a regular seventh-grader in a small town, enjoying time in nature, going to school, navigating the tween social world of friends and frenemies. With no routine-shattering excitement happening around her, Allie enjoys simply watching other people around her and letting her imagination run wild in inventing background stories and character insights for those she sees.
Rather than seeing Allie’s way of passing the time as creative and insightful, her friends and family too often react negatively to Allie’s imagination, castigating her for making up stories and lies about people or things. But in Allie’s mind there is a difference between inventive fiction and reality, both in how she thinks about things and how she tells people about her observations and musings.
Aside from one of her teachers who seems empathetic to Allie, only her old friend Dub seems to really understand and appreciate her. Yet, Dub is a boy, and others now look at Allie and Dub hanging out and have different assumptions compared to when they were younger. But for Allie, he’s still just Dub, the same friend.
The cliffsides of Fossil Glen are a frequent site for school field trips, and a place for Allie to explore with Dub, or alone. During a recent trip there, Allie climbs too high, and begins to panic about descending and potentially falling. But then she hears a girl’s voice helping to guide her safely down, a voice that then pleads “Help me.” Allie wants to tell others about the strange experience, but realizes they will just accuse her of lying and making things up.
Allie begins having nightmares of the girl falling to her death in the Fossil Glen ravine and is soon visited by more waking ghostly visitations of this girl, who Allie soon discovers is a girl named Lucy who died in an apparent accidental four years prior. However, Lucy’s haunting of Allie indicates that Lucy’s death was not accidental. Lucy guides Allie to discovery of her lost diary, which reveals the truth behind Lucy’s last days and death, and then puts Allie at risk from the greedy man who killed Lucy.
How can Allie convince people what happened, to save Lucy’s memory, save the town, and save herself?
I was incredibly impressed with how great this novel is, both something that I would have enjoyed when younger and still easily enjoy now. I plan on looking for the other novels in the series that feature Allie and ghostly encounters.
DeFelice succeeds with both the plot and characters of the novel while focusing on themes that would be relevant to young adults (and those beyond) such as fitting in and being true to oneself. The story works effectively as a ghost story that feels horror-adjacent in that it has moments of creepiness or scariness. At first these come from the haunting, but then the reader quickly realizes that the true horror and evil threat comes from the living, a man willing to stop at nothing to maintain economic and political power.
The novel works equally well as a mystery though, gradually revealing to Allie and the reader the truth of what has happened to Lucy, and then facing the uncertainty of what Allie can do with the truth she has learned: how she can get evidence, how she can correct the situation and bring justice to Lucy, particularly when everyone around Allie doubts her stories and ‘overactive imagination.’
In the end it is the supposed weaknesses and defects in Allie that end up righting wrongs and saving people and Fossil Glen. DeFelice passes on a powerful message without it being overwrought or fabricated.
This is a book that deserves to stay in circulation for kids and adults to both continue enjoying and learning from.
