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Phil Hickes's The Haunting of Aveline Jones is a properly spooky ghost story for 9 year olds about a girl who buys an old book with its last story scribbled out.
Aveline LOVES ghost stories. Her mum wishes she'd read about literally anything else.
It's a freezing October half-term and Aveline has been packed off to stay with her very strict Aunt Lilian in Malmouth, a quiet town on the Cornish coast. There's no TV, the phone signal is hopeless and there's a horrible Halloween scarecrow in a garden down the road.
Then she finds a dusty little bookshop down some steps. The owner, Mr Lieberman, sells her a rare book of local ghost stories for one pound. Inside the cover is a girl's name, Primrose Penberthy. And the final story has been crossed out, line by line, so nobody can ever read it.
Who would do that? And why?
When Aveline looks Primrose up, she finds out she went missing from Malmouth on Halloween night over thirty years ago. And nothing she can find says she was ever found.
Aveline is a lovely heroine for a nervous but nosy reader. She's shy, she goes red at everything and she's a bit homesick, but she still can't leave a mystery alone. Mr Lieberman's great-nephew Harold (floppy fringe, not much of a talker) makes a good partner in crime too.
The creepy moments build slowly. A mocking little laugh in the night. A small girl standing in the stormy sea who nobody else seems to notice. Scratching at the kitchen window at 3am, and in the morning, what looks very like a child's handprint on the glass. It's the sort of chill that's best enjoyed under a duvet!
Just so you know, this is a genuinely scary story about a missing child, and the chills build steadily. It's probably best for children who actually enjoy being frightened (the ones who ask for the scary bit again). A child who struggles with bad dreams may find it too much.
Desperate for more of Aveline afterwards? The Bewitching of Aveline Jones takes her to a summer cottage beside an ancient stone circle, where a mysterious girl on a black horse is waiting.
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