Scarlet and Ivy 2 – The Whispers in the Walls

Sophie Cleverly's The Whispers in the Walls is a spooky boarding-school mystery for 10 year olds about twin sisters sent back to the one place they never wanted to see again.

What happens

Scarlet and Ivy are together again, which is the good news. The bad news is Rookwood School. Their father won't listen, their stepmother wants them gone, and within a day they're back behind the school gates.

Rookwood's headmaster is back after an illness, too. Mr Bartholomew is huge and hunched, coughs into a red handkerchief and has a voice that rattles like bones. Then, out of nowhere, he ROARS. He tells the whole school that Ivy is a new girl, as if nothing that happened last term was real.

Worse still, Scarlet's old enemy Violet is back too. But she's pale, silent and strangely blank, and nobody knows why. Her friend Penny is furious and blames Scarlet.

And at night, in their room, Scarlet is sure she can hear things moving inside the walls.

The story swaps between the two sisters, and they're SO different. Scarlet is fiery, rude and brave, the kind of girl who kicks walls and swaps desks without telling anyone. Ivy is shy and careful and just wants to finish her dinner in peace. It's lovely hearing each of them worry about the other (and each of them being quietly annoyed with the other too).

There's a proper old-fashioned feel. Motor cars, ballet lessons in a chilly basement, stew for dinner every night and plenty of stern teachers saying "Miss Grey!".

It's worth knowing that it starts somewhere dark. The opening pages include Scarlet's diary from a hospital for the mentally ill, where she was locked away under another name and told she was imagining things. The girls' father is cold, the stepmother is plain nasty, and a kind aunt is pushed out of their lives with a tear-stained letter. For a sensitive reader, that unfairness can sting.

If your reader likes a mystery with shivers rather than gore, they'll probably race through it.

This is the second book and it leans hard on the first, so please start with The Lost Twin. Everything here makes much more sense (and is much more exciting) once you know how the twins got to this point.

What to read next

After that, if they're keen on another gloomy school with secrets, try A Girl Called Justice. Justice Jones is sent to a boarding school on the Romney Marshes, and the taxi driver lets slip that the undertaker was called out there last week.