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The Ghosts of Bitterfly Bay

ebook
1 of 1 copy available
1 of 1 copy available
A ghost must team up with the living girl she’s been haunting in order to defeat a monster out of her nightmares and save her little brother, from the author of The Curse of Eelgrass Bog.
Maudie isn’t your typical twelve-year-old girl—she’s the ghost of one. Along with her best friend Kit and little brother Scratch, she haunts a cottage in the woods, doing her best to scare off the vacationers and forget her old life.
But everything changes when Kit and Scratch go missing. Maudie knows something terrible must have happened, and she’s right: Longfingers—a monster from her own nightmares, with spidery fingers and needle-sharp teeth—has stolen her friends away.
Longfingers makes Maudie a twisted deal: find the key to a door in a mysterious cabin, or she’ll never see her friends again. With nobody else to turn to, Maudie has to beg for help from Gianna, the living girl she’s been haunting. Together, the girls search for a way to thwart the monster and save Maudie’s friends.
But Maudie’s keeping secrets about the cabin and her past. Unless she finds a way to finally face the truth, she may never be able to rescue her friends from Longfingers’s grasp.
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    • Kirkus

      December 15, 2024
      A young ghost and a living girl face down an evil threat. First-person narrator Maudie, her little brother, Scratch, and their friend Kit became ghosts almost a year ago. They haunt Mayflower Cottage, a vacation rental near the titular bay of a Canadian lake. They amuse themselves by watching the strange phenomena on their side of "the veil" and playing their "haunting game," in which they compete to scare visitors away. Then a horror writer and his two daughters arrive to stay in the cottage at the same time that a creepy cabin just...appears on an island in the lake. Shortly after, Scratch and Kit go missing. Convinced that the evil Longfingers--a character from a ghost story she made up--has trapped Scratch and Kit on the island, Maudie reaches through the veil to make contact with Gianna, the author's younger daughter, for help. As she did in her debut, The Curse of Eelgrass Bog (2024), Averling endows her young protagonist with a mysterious supernatural origin story, a beguilingly weird setting, and an anchoring friend. But this outing feels patched together, the pace muddled and the metaphysics arbitrary and unsatisfying. One of Averling's strengths is her ear for fresh figurative language, but she kneecaps herself with an overreliance on simile that makes the writing feel stale. Maudie's an appealing character, but she can't overcome the story's weaknesses. Characters present white. A stumbling second outing.(Supernatural. 9-12)

      COPYRIGHT(2024) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

    • Booklist

      February 1, 2025
      Grades 4-7 There isn't much to do around Bitterfly Bay, especially when you're a ghost, which is why 12-year-old Maudie, Scratch (her kid brother), and Kit (her best friend) make a game out of haunting the guests of Mayflower Cottage. When Arthur Edevane arrives with his two daughters, Maudie selects the younger girl, Gianna, as her target. However, it's Maudie who's in for a shock when Gianna successfully casts a spell that lets her see and hear Maudie. The two become friends and allies when Scratch and Kit disappear after going to investigate an old cabin that mysteriously appeared on an island in Bitterfly Bay. A sinister atmosphere leaches into the story as Averling (The Curse of Eelgrass Bog, 2024) drops hints about a tragedy in Maudie and Scratch's past and a nightmare figure called Longfingers finds footing in the real world. The scale of Averling's world building is, perhaps, a bit grand for the immediate story, but all her ideas are interesting, and readers--especially fans of Lora Senf's The Clackity (2022)--will happily tiptoe among them.

      COPYRIGHT(2025) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

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