After moving from Florida to Alabama to be with their family, sisters Kayla and Kylie try to make the best of the situation as their family adjusts to the move. When Kylie starts talking about her friend Emily, whom no one else has met, they start to grow concerned about something more than an imaginary friend, as they each begin to experience several chilling ghostly visions, the more they stay at the house. Determined to get to the bottom of things, they discover that the graveyard next to the property holds a connection to the dangerous past of the town, forcing them to solve the puzzle before it's too late.
This was a generally impressive and wholly worthwhile book with quite a lot going on. The central storyline at play, offering a fine main storyline about the family adjusting to the move to the house as the daughters try to get their lives into a semblance of normalcy following a series of personal crises involving a debilitating cancer diagnosis, infidelity claims, and the eldest daughter at odds with the mother provides a great start. This also ends up allowing the introduction of the secondary storyline investigating the secrets surrounding the local cemetery by following the clues that hint at the younger daughter becoming friends with one of the children at the cemetery, and using the experience to become familiar with everything going on that’s interpreted as dreams about the cemetery in a strong series of connections that make it easy to believe they can happen and ramps up the tension nicely alongside the fine work already at establishing the emotional resonance family at the center of everything. This idea of looking into the past and discovering not just the strange connection between the disease that ravaged the town, the strange associations with the nursery rhyme, and the serial killer that struck the town years earlier also works nicely by making the eventual reveal of the ghostly residents who begin following them feel far more mysterious.
This is what helps make the second half feel far more chilling, where the different aspects start getting more physically involved. With the reveal about the presence of the ghost children and what they're trying to accomplish, the increasingly prominent figure from the past that becomes a major force in the story going forward, and the looming threat over the family as they try to look into the different incidents that have taken place, this one keeps things moving along at a rather fun pace and introduces some shocking developments along the way. The action scenes here are rather fun, focusing on the idea of the ghostly figures supposedly being friendly, only for the shock of their appearance and uncertainty of their true nature, making for the inherent confusion over their true intentions, even with the later appearances going for more sinister tones. The graveyard scenes involving the ghost children tempting and taunting the daughter to join them have an eeriness to their encounters that are suitably chilling considering their target, while the older sisters’ friends continually trying to investigate matters take them into the graveyard at night for some creepy moments as well.
There’s not a whole lot to dislike here, but it does come with some issues. The biggest issue is the sense of realism in the family drama that comes about, making it hard to understand why they would go through with everything. With the infidelity shot fired at the husband, very obvious intonations of Christian guilt on the mother’s part for her daughters’ illness at the expense of her familial duties, the older daughter pulling away with little repercussions, and very little in the way of genuine connection to each other beyond stressing over the ill daughter, there’s some disconnect in believing the family would go through the move at this stage regardless of the job that brings them here. Likewise, some of the twists in the second half seem to be introduced as a means of keeping the story moving along, especially when it feels like the story could have been ended sooner, particularly in how they continue to harp on the daughters’ behavior without much sense. However, the feverish writing style keeps this one moving at such a fun clip that there's little chance of that thought popping up, which is quite effective at keeping the reader invested in what's happening.
5/5
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