Just So Stories

Harper Collins Australia

October 2021

• ISBN: 9780008612443
• ISBN 10: 0008612447
• Imprint: Magpie Books GB
• RRP: $24.99

Can’t let the little ones have all the fun for Halloween! This is a debut YA novel for which I recently wrote teaching notes**** and it was a really good mash-up of family, ghosts/horror, quest and rom-com.

Cara is a serious student, trying her best to excel – in classes, in extra-curricular, in being a good Chinese daughter. She has her eyes set firmly on college and does not need any distractions. She especially does not need to be talking to ghosts, or helping them, and she definitely does not want to be the ‘ghost speaker’, whatver that is that’s she overhearing from various spectres. Really, she’d much rather not even see them, but unfortunately (or not) she has inherited her dead grandmother’s ability to do so.

Local golden boy – white, rich, popular – Zach is her nemesis at school and she is not at all pleased to be partnered with him on an important school project. When they arrange to meet at her old treehouse in the woods, she is furious when he stands her up. Stomping her way home, she’s not so much furious as dumbfounded and shocked to find his dead body under a tree.

It turns out (according to her ghostly grandmother) that Zach has been killed by an ancient power and that Cara is the only one with the power to resurrect him, before it’s too late and he’s dead forever.

What follows is a quest through portals and weird landscapes, meeting strange people and creatures along the way – some good but most not – and a race against time to get Zach back to breathing. Of course, as he’s technically dead, Cara can still see him, talk to him, argue with him and – surprise! – fall in love with him, and vice versa.

It’s actually a lot of fun and a jolly read – just creepy enough without being ‘horror’. I enjoyed it, and had a lot of fun writing ideas for exploring it, but I won’t pretend it’s high end literary. That being said, though a little uneven at times, as a debut novel, it’s a good start and it would make a fab read for your book group for older students – 14 and up is my recommendation. I give it a big 5👻👻👻👻👻 rating.

****(not on the publisher’s website *ping me if you’re interested)