The Mesmerist

Ronald L Smith's The Mesmerist is a Victorian ghost story for 10 year olds about a girl whose fake seances turn out to be hiding something real.

What happens

Jessamine Grace is thirteen and she is folded inside a wardrobe with a chalk slate, waiting for her cue.

The business is simple. Her mother sits with the grieving client. Jess writes the comforting message in advance, hides it, swaps it for a blank slate, then falls out of the wardrobe with a gasp and a fresh bruise on her forehead.

It's a fraud and Jess knows it. She feels rather sorry for Dr Barnes, who has lost his daughter and wants very much to believe.

Then her mother opens the slate and goes white.

The words on it are not the ones Jess wrote. They're a nursery rhyme about ashes and all falling down, and underneath, in a spidery scrawl, a single letter M.

That's a superb opening and the book doesn't waste it. By morning they're on a train to London to meet a man with no surname, and Jess learns several things at once. That her mother has a past. That her father didn't die the way she was told. That the thing she's been pretending to be, she actually is.

The period detail is done with real care. Second-class carriages, because first is beyond them. The smell of absinthe, which Jess loves because it reminds her of liquorice at Christmas (and which her mother has been drinking rather too often since her father died).

This one is genuinely dark, so do have a think first. A servant girl carries burn scars from an attempted execution at the stake, described in a few clear sentences over breakfast. Jess's father was killed by something, and the sentence telling you how stops halfway because she can't finish it.

There's a childhood friend she remembers too, an Indian girl called Deepa, chased and called dreadful names by local boys. Jess didn't stand up for her and still thinks about it. Handled honestly rather than dodged, and worth a conversation.

Does your reader want a ghost story that actually frightens them? This is the real thing. If they want a shiver and then lights out, it may be too much.

What to read next

If it suits them, A Most Magical Girl is in the library. Annabel Grey is left with two very odd aunts in Victorian London and finds there's an urgent job only she can do.