Where the Lost Ones Go

Akemi Dawn Bowman's Where the Lost Ones Go is a gentle ghost story for 9 year olds about a girl who wants to find her grandma one more time.

What happens

Eliot is twelve and has just moved from California to a small town in Maine. The new house smells of lemon cleaning spray, which she decides smells "like deception". Her grandma, Babung, has died. Before that, dementia took Babung's memories, including her memory of Eliot.

So Eliot has a plan. She has a forty-dollar ghost detector (it is NOT a toy). If ghosts exist, she can find Babung and make sure she remembers how much she was loved.

Her parents want a fresh start and don't like talking about Babung. When Mom unwraps one of Babung's little jade frogs, she quickly wraps it up again and buries it in a crate. Eliot builds a shrine for Babung anyway, with rice, candles and her crocheted rabbits.

Then some local girls dare her to knock on the back door of Honeyfield Hall, the spooky house on the hill where a "witch" supposedly lives. She goes. Behind the screen door, instead of a witch, there's a pale girl with piercing blue eyes.

Eliot's head is a very busy place. When she's nervous she can't stop talking. Meeting the neighbourhood girls, she somehow ends up explaining immortal jellyfish and horseshoe crabs in one breath. If you've got a reader whose thoughts race ahead of their mouth, they'll probably feel very seen. Her family is lovely too, from Dad's terrible jokes to the tempura sushi roll he packs in her lunchbox.

This one is about grief first and ghosts second. Babung's death, her illness and her ashes being scattered at sea all come up early. There's also a local boy who died in a car accident, and a strange man in black in the graveyard who tells Eliot she's "quite early". A child who has recently lost a grandparent may find it very close to home. It might also be exactly the comfort they need, because Eliot's sadness is taken seriously and never hurried along.

What to read next

If they'd like another girl, a much-loved granny and a visitor who isn't quite what she seems, try A Greyhound of a Girl. Mary's granny isn't well, and a woman in an old-fashioned dress stops her in the rain and seems to know all about it.