One girl moves into a new home... but that home has a creepy dollhouse and ghosts.. and mysteries that begin to haunt her. Alice is forced to move after her parents decide to start getting a divorce. Alice and her mother head into a small town where her mother can work as a live-in nurse to a rich elderly lady. The house they move into is regarded as somewhat haunted. It is a huge, imposing house that is kinda spooky but kept in perfect shape. Things begin to get weird for Alice when she finds a dollhouse in the attic that is an exact replica of the house she’s living in... and she wakes up to a ghost girl that looks like one of the dolls in the dollhouse... Overall an interesting middle-grade read filled with a little bit of haunting and a little bit of ghosts and a lot of mystery.

*Thanks Netgalley and Penguin Random House Canada for sending me an arc in exchange for an honest review*

This is a cute children’s ghost story. It was very well written. I will be recommending this to people at work.

I love a middle-grade ghost story, and was looking forward to a suitably creepy little tale here. Unfortunately, I struggled to connect with this book in the way I have to other spooky stories for the age group.
My main problem, I think, was the dialogue. None of the characters, especially the adult characters, felt ‘real’ to me, or like they had a fully formed voice; oddly enough, I had the fewest problems with the dialogue during the dreamlike sections where Alice (our protagonist) interacts with ghosts.
I also felt uncomfortable with the way developmental disability featured in the story. I know from the author’s note that Cotter based her disabled characters on a real-life girl she knew, and consulted with that girl’s mother and sibling to get things right, and I don’t want to speak for them; however, the depictions of Lily and Bubble, the two developmentally delayed girls in the story, played into several tropes that made me raise my eyebrows. There’s a long history of people with cognitive disabilities being portrayed as extra-sensitive to magic/ghosts/otherworldliness in fiction, and while often well-meaning, it’s so closely interrelated to harmful and ableist narratives about who’s normal and who’s ‘other’ that I felt uncomfortable watching Lily function as our protagonist’s ‘spirit guide’ or ‘guardian angel’ at points in the story.