• Age: 8 to 12
• Grade: 3 to 7

A ghost must team up with the living girl she’s been haunting in order to defeat a monster out of her nightmares and save her little brother, from the author of The Curse of Eelgrass Bog.

Maudie isn’t your typical twelve-year-old girl—she’s the ghost of one. Along with her best friend Kit and little brother Scratch, she haunts a cottage in the woods, doing her best to scare off the vacationers and forget her old life.

But everything changes when Kit and Scratch go missing. Maudie knows something terrible must have happened, and she’s right: Longfingers—a monster from her own nightmares, with spidery fingers and needle-sharp teeth—has stolen her friends away.

Longfingers makes Maudie a twisted deal: find the key to a door in a mysterious cabin, or she’ll never see her friends again. With nobody else to turn to, Maudie has to beg for help from Gianna, the living girl she’s been haunting. Together, the girls search for a way to thwart the monster and save Maudie’s friends.

But Maudie’s keeping secrets about the cabin and her past. Unless she finds a way to finally face the truth, she may never be able to rescue her friends from Longfingers’s grasp.

Mary Averling's profile page

Mary Averling grew up across England and Canada, never far from the woods. She has degrees from the University of Victoria and Lucy Cavendish College, Cambridge. Since she can't stay away from libraries for very long, she is currently working toward her PhD in Ontario, where she lives surrounded by all the magical, spooky, heartfelt books she can find.

“A young ghost and a living girl face down an evil threat. One of Averling’s strengths is her ear for fresh figurative language…As she did in her debut, Averling endows her young protagonist with a mysterious supernatural origin story, a beguilingly weird setting, and an anchoring friend.” —Kirkus Reviews