The Ghost of Crutchfield Hall by Mary Downing Hahn
Pre-Order on Amazon (Releases 9/6/2010)
When twelve-year-old Florence boards the crowded horse-drawn coach in London, she looks forward to a new life with her great uncle and aunt at Crutchfield Hall, an old manor house in the English countryside. Anything will be better, she thinks, than the grim London orphanage where she has lived since her parents’ death.
But Florence doesn’t expect the ghost of her cousin Sophia, who haunts the cavernous rooms and dimly lit hallways of Crutchfield and concocts a plan to use Florence to help her achieve her murderous goals. Will Florence be able to convince the others in the household of the imminent danger and stop Sophia before it’s too late?
My review:
This was a very short (132 pages) ghost story that had quite a few tried-and-true methods of scaring the living bejeebus out of a person like me. Recently I’ve been diving into the more tame horror novels and all I can say is I’m glad I read this one in the light of day.
The story begins with a setting very similar to The Secret Garden. Girl (Florence) arrives at a creepy large house, taken in by her older Aunt and Uncle and has a sick boy cousin hidden away in his room. The similarities really end there as the boy’s dead sister begins to torment poor Florence.
There were a few things that kept me from giving this story a higher rating. Nellie, the maid living in Crutchfield Hall seemed like a carbon copy of the little maid in Shirley Temple’s “A Little Princess” movie. I was even putting her voice to the words because her style of speaking was so similar. Also there was quite a bit of name-dropping of classics and it just felt a bit awkward, like the author was trying to make the book a more period novel and the only way she could remind us of the time period was to give us examples of books being read.
Overall though, it’s a solid ghost story for a teenager looking for something in the genre to read. It’s short and to the point, which doesn’t hurt at all either.
i love it