The Curse on Spectacle Key

Chantel Acevedo's The Curse on Spectacle Key is a spooky mystery for 9 year olds about a boy whose family finally stops moving, straight into a lighthouse that doesn't want them.

What happens

Frank Fernández has lived in a train station, a water tower and a church. His parents turn odd old buildings into homes and then sell them. So he's always the new kid, and he calls himself Friendless Frank.

This time he'd actually made a friend and got a place on a summer library scheme. Then his parents announce the next project. It's a broken-down lighthouse on a tiny island in the Florida Keys, and they promise it's the last move ever. His grandad lives a couple of hours away. And they've bought him a Great Dane puppy.

He names her Mary Shelley, after the woman who wrote Frankenstein. Of course he does!

The lighthouse is a disaster from the minute they open the door. A light bulb explodes. There's mould in his wardrobe. A ceiling fan crashes down at dinner, and one day hundreds of crabs come pouring out of the toilet (Papi comes running down the stairs covered in them).

Then the strange things start. Someone knocks at the door and nobody's there. There's a sigh, and a sweet fruity smell that follows him around. Across the island sits an abandoned stone house. When Mary Shelley bolts inside, Frank finds an old doll in a sailor suit with a key round its neck. Written in the sand on the floor is HELP ME, FARNK.

His first thought is to scream. His second is that whoever wrote it can't spell his name!

That's the feel of the whole thing. Frank loves scary books and knows exactly how horror stories go, so he stops to check whether he's the main character or the side character who wanders off. It's creepy and funny at the same time. His dad from Cuba and his mum from the Keys bicker like mad about the money pit they've bought, which is funny too, as long as bickering parents aren't a sore spot for your reader.

It's properly spooky in places, with knocks, whispers and a message in the sand. But in the opening chapters it's the kind of scary that makes you want to keep reading rather than sleep with the light on.

What to read next

If they love a family doing up a creepy old house, Mimi McCoy's The Dead End has another one. Casey's parents buy a big old farmhouse in New Hampshire that needs fixing, and she has to spend the whole summer there.