Laura Ruby

Lily’s Ghosts
by Laura Ruby
Recommended Age: 13+

When Lily and her mother move into her great uncle’s palatial summer house in Cape May, New Jersey, the spirit world is disturbed. There do seem to be an awful lot of ghosts hanging around the seashore, and several of them share house with Lily and Arden. Though Lily cannot actually see the ghosts, and at first doesn’t believe in them, a series of creepy disturbances eventually lead Lily and her new friend Vaz to the conclusion that somebody is trying to tell her something. And that somebody may be the ghost of an uncle who died in a fire at age 17 – a fire he was supposed to have set himself.

As if having a suspected arsonist in the family isn’t bad enough, Lily also has to deal with her own jealousy over the handsome, popular Vaz... her troubled relationship with her mother... her fussy, unfriendly Uncle Wesley... a fake spirit medium who doesn’t react well to the news that she can actually communicate with ghosts... a suspicious neighbor, a hostile librarian, and a beachful of ghosts that may include a treasure-burying pirate.

This is a clever, funny, goose-pimply, and in the end suspenseful and exciting story, in which the living and the dead each have interesting things going on in their respective world, and in which their two worlds collide in sometimes goofy, sometimes scary, always unexpected ways.

EDIT: Other books by Laura Ruby include I'm Not Julia Roberts, Good Girls, The Wall and the Wing, and The Chaos King.