Evie’s Ghost

Evie's Ghost by Helen Peters is a spooky time-slip story for 11 year olds about a very cross thirteen-year-old who ends up working as a housemaid in 1814.

What happens

Evie is furious. Mum has married her shiny new husband and flown off to Venice. Evie is packed off to a godmother she hasn't seen since she was a baby, in a flat inside an enormous old house miles from anywhere.

Within an hour her phone has drowned in a puddle. There's no TV. And there's a real human skull on the table called Yorick.

Her godmother Anna has a bright pink streak in her silver hair and orange baseball boots. She examines skeletons for a living (there's an old burial ground being dug up right outside Evie's window). She's also the worst hostess in history, as far as Evie is concerned.

Scratched into Evie's bedroom window is a name and a date. Sophia Fane, imprisoned here, 1814. Anna tells her the story. Sophia's father locked her in this very room when she wouldn't marry the rich friend he'd chosen for her, and then nobody knows what became of her.

At midnight, Evie's reflection in the glass beckons to her and mouths "Help me". She runs from the room. And on the other side of the door she's wearing a long grey dress and an apron, and a woman with a French accent is shoving her off to the kitchens.

Evie's voice is the best thing about it. She's dramatic, sarcastic and very funny about her own misery. Then, in 1814, she's scrubbing pots until her hands bleed, and all that attitude has to grow up fast. Would your reader survive a day below stairs? It gives a really vivid feel for how hard servants worked.

Sophia's story has some grown-up edges, and it's good to know that before you start. She was expecting a baby when she was locked up, and the baby was taken from her while she slept. There are rumours she was murdered. At a ball, Evie watches a girl of barely sixteen being pushed towards a man of over forty. None of it is graphic, but it's heavier than the cheeky start suggests, and the midnight scenes are properly shivery.

A reader who likes a ghost story with a mystery to solve (and a heroine who's allowed to be annoying) will probably love it.

What to read next

If they're hooked on life below stairs, Friends and Traitors is another Helen Peters story set in a vast country house. This time the new housemaid is Nancy, fourteen, and a whole school has just been evacuated there because of the war.