Read The Girl in the Lake free in the Little Reads app.
The Girl in the Lake is a ghost story for 10 year olds, and the thing Celeste is dreading at the start of it is a swimming lesson.
She is twelve and she cannot swim. Her little brother Owen picked it up in no time. Her instructor sighed every time she would not jump into his arms and never once got her name right. She has decided she is finished with water.
Which is, of course, the summer her parents drive her out to the lake house where her mother grew up, for a fortnight.
No phone signal. A lake right behind the house. Cousins she has not seen in years, one of them nearly sixteen and furious about something, one of them eleven and strange in a way Celeste cannot put her finger on.
And as they pull up, something moves behind the glass right at the top of the house.
India Hill Brown does two things at once here and both of them work. One is a proper haunting. Creaks overhead. Footsteps when nobody is upstairs. Somebody calling Celeste down to dinner when no one did. The same dream about water closing over her, over and over.
The other is the reason Celeste's grandparents will not let this swimming thing drop. Over dinner, Grandad explains why so many Black families never learned. Pools with Whites Only signs. A hotel pool drained because Dorothy Dandridge put her toe in it. A motel owner pouring acid into the water while protesters were still standing in it.
That last one is real and it is horrible, and it lands in the middle of a chapter with no warning. If your child is going to ask questions about it, and they should, be somewhere you can answer them.
Then Grandma brings out the photo album and shows Celeste a picture of her great-aunt, and Celeste screams, because she is looking at her own face. And when she asks what happened to her, Grandma says they should not talk about that right now.
The scares build slowly rather than jumping out at you, which is kinder for a child who wants to be frightened but not too much.
For another girl packed off to a huge strange house she did not choose, try The Dollhouse: A Ghost Story. Alice is on a train with her mother crying beside her, heading to a place where something has been asleep for a very long time.
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