The Dollhouse: A Ghost Story

Charis Cotter's The Dollhouse: A Ghost Story is a properly spooky summer mystery for 9 year olds about a girl who wakes up next to a stranger in a haunted house.

What happens

Alice is twelve and her summer has just fallen to pieces. She walks in from the last day of school to find her mum and dad in a huge row. The family holiday at the lake is off. By the next evening Alice and her mum are on a train to a small town, where Mum has taken a live-in nursing job.

The train stops so suddenly that Alice bangs her head. When she comes round, the first thing she asks is "Am I dead?" (she really isn't). And through the window she sees a grand old house on a hill, with the moon rising behind it.

That's Blackwood House, where they're going to live. The taxi driver helpfully tells them it stood empty for nearly seventy years and nobody sensible goes near it. The old lady who owns it fell down the stairs and is very, very cross about everything.

Then there's Alice's gorgeous green bedroom. It has a four-poster bed, an antique doll with auburn curls, and a girl called Lily who says she once saw a ghost sleeping in that bed.

In the middle of that night, Alice opens her eyes. There's a red-haired girl asleep beside her.

What's lovely is how much you're inside Alice's head. She has a HUGE imagination. A late mum turns into a car crash, a funeral and a wicked stepmother in about five minutes flat. So when something strange really does happen, she's not sure what to believe, and neither are you.

A heads-up for parents. The row is right there on the page, and Alice is clearly upset about them splitting up. Her imagination also goes to some gory places, like a train crash with bodies. If your child's parents are separating, it might hit a nerve. But if your reader loves a shiver and a mystery to piece together, it's a real page-turner.

And somewhere up in the attic there's a dollhouse built to look exactly like Blackwood House. Who doesn't love a spooky dollhouse?

What to read next

If they're ready for something a little older, Evie's Ghost has another girl packed off to the middle of nowhere, this time to a godmother she hasn't seen since she was a baby, while her mum flies away on honeymoon.