Phil Hickes: Shadowhall Academy – Ghost Story Society (Usborne Publishing 2025)
Suffolk, England January 1988
Mysteries needed to be solved. Or are there secrets that are better left untended? Lilian Jones and her friends should have learned from what happened to them last term, but of course they didn’t… As if the school wasn’t creepy enough, they started a Ghost Story Society where they can scare each other and themselves. Of course, only gently. The club turns out to be fun until they hear a story about a mysterious book that has caused a lot of trouble long ago and is supposedly still in the school. Lilian wants nothing more than to find out what the truth is. This puts not only herself, but her friends and the entire school in danger.
The special atmosphere of the boarding school is felt in this story, which 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. I really like the characters and the unbreakable bond between them, which makes them stand by each other even when they don’t seem to deserve it. I have a feeling that this is not the last time the girls have gotten involved in hair-raising adventures…
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.
