The Whispers of Wilderwood Hall

Karen McCombie's The Whispers of Wilderwood Hall is a gentle, spooky mystery for 11 year olds about a shy girl whose whole life changes in less than three months.

What happens

Ellis is thirteen, very tall and very shy. For as long as she can remember it's been just her and her mum in a flat in North London. Then her mum meets RJ, from a famous old indie band, and marries him on a boat on the Thames less than three months later.

Ellis spends the wedding trying not to be sick over the side. (She doesn't manage it, and a photographer catches the moment for a gossip magazine.)

Next comes the really big surprise. RJ has bought a falling-down mansion in the Highlands of Scotland, online, without ever seeing it. So Ellis and her mum drive for ten hours to Wilderwood Hall, while RJ heads off on tour.

The house is enormous and crumbling, and they camp out in the old servants' rooms. Her best friend back home is barely speaking to her, there's no wifi, and a boy from the village with eyes like a bird's has already seen her faint in the café.

And then the house starts doing odd things. A clatter of voices and bells in the empty old kitchen. A battered door with its paint blackened and blistered. Whispering in the walls of her new bedroom.

What makes this special is Ellis herself. She talks about her anxiety as waves that roll in and tip everything sideways, and you feel every wobble with her. It's done with a light touch and lots of humour, and her mum's reminder that the waves always roll back out again is lovely.

Later on, Ellis finds herself back in 1912, when Wilderwood was new, and makes friends with Flora, a lonely servant girl. It's a story about wanting to escape into another time, and about whether the present might hold more than you think. The Titanic plays its part as well.

If you've got a reader who's facing a big change, a move or a new family, they'll recognise a lot of Ellis. It's a cosy sort of spooky rather than properly scary.

What to read next

For more voices in an old house and a girl from the past, try The Pearl in the Attic, where a story passed down in Scarlet's family, and giggling heard in an attic above a shop, lead back to a girl called Ruby.