Young Adult Book Reviews

Genre: Realistic Fiction

Number of pages: 218

JB admits right away that he has been punished severely for getting caught breaking and entering into a large house in his town. He has not offered much in the way of an excuse, and appears to be taking his punishment without complaint. His mother even made him stop playing basketball for his entire freshmen year, even in his own driveway. Throughout the ordeal he has also lost his group of friends who scattered the second he got into trouble and all went their own way in high school. He has found himself sitting with an odd bunch of students at lunch who really have no one else to sit with so they have banded together. One of the people he sits with, Marty, is someone JB feels a lot of guilt about because when he was younger he used to torment him and purposefully leave him out of things. That’s partly why he agrees to go when Marty pitches the idea of them driving out to an abandoned house that is believed to be haunted. JB knows if he got caught again it would not go well for him, but he feels like he owes this to Marty, especially when it appears that everyone else will back out. Then, surprisingly his former best friend and a popular new girl in school offer to come along and suddenly they have a group of five people going to investigate this haunted house in the middle of the night. Will they encounter any supernatural activity? Will they form lifelong friendships? Will JB get his punishment extended into his sophomore year?

This coming of age story follows a group of high school students who all agree to go to a “haunted house” for different reasons. Once they are there, they all have to face some of the things they had been avoiding such as J.B.’s resentment toward his friends for abandoning him, Marty’s past bullying, and Jennie’s loss of her sister. The ending is realistic and satisfying for a story in which the main characters are not finished finding their way. Fans looking for scary/suspenseful stories might not find enough of that here, but fans who enjoy coming of age stories will want to know more about these characters once the story ends.