The Ghosts of Bitterfly Bay

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)

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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.

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