Phil Hickes: Shadowhall Academy – The Whispering Walls (Usborne Publishing 2024)
Suffolk, England, September 1987
Lilian Jones is just starting the new school year at the famous Shadowhall Academy. It’s already scary enough that she has to leave her family and friends and study at a new school, and she also has three roommates at the boarding school, where she has to make new friends and find her way in the maze of corridors, but those turn out to be the least of her worries. Spooky knocks and whispers can be heard from the walls at night. Lilian and her roommates decide to investigate it, but in the process they discover that Shadowhall hides many more secrets…
Even the Aveline Jones series should be required reading in my opinion, but I also really liked this story. In it, we can read not only about ghosts, but also about the world of Irish folktales, which I really like. The story successfully balances on the edge of the spookiness and is more exciting than scary, so I recommend it to those who, like me, are easily scared and don’t like particularly scary books. This is a perfect read for October evenings or afternoons!
Phil Hickes was born in the UK and grew up near Manchester in a house overlooking a graveyard… That explains a lot. As a child, he was always attracted to scary things. He especially liked the books of Alen Garner and Susan Cooper. Because of them, he believed that extraordinary things can happen to ordinary children. After the UK, he also lived in Ireland and New Zealand, but finally settled in Oregon with his wife, and on foggy, rainy, pine-scented nights, they listen to the coyotes. In his books, he believes in the mood-creating power of seasons and landscapes. After the Aveline Jones series, The Whispering Walls is the first volume of his next book series.
