Mary Downing Hahn

When thirteen-year-old Ali spends the summer with her aunt and cousin at the family's vacation home, she stumbles upon a secret that her mother and aunt have been hiding for over thirty years.

Deep and dark and dangerous

Gabriela Roxana 

Nobody loves Mary Downing Hahn more than me.

I read several of her works, and although she wrote over 40 books, I intend to read them all.

However, this one simply didn't do anything for me. I went in this book with high expectations because of the high rating it had on GR. No other book of hers was rated that high. Unfortunately, for me, it turned out to be the weakest work I've read of hers so far.

The story follows Ally that has been living with her depressed mother for a while. She finds a mysterious picture with her mother and her aunt as children and the silhouette of another child whose face was ripped from the picture. Her mother refuses to talk about the picture, but when Ally goes with her aunt to live near the Lake where the two women grew up, the truth is set to come out no matter how much one may want to bury it. It should have been over exciting, but it... Wasn't.

There wasn't much to the story either. The whole mystery was not that big of a deal after all. The book had no tension, and I can hardly think of it as being horror in any way. A ghost story doesn't mean a book horror.

I will continuely to read the rest of this amazing author stories, but I will pick them according to their descriptions, not their ratings from now on.

Sara 

I never really read ghost stories, but a few years ago, I saw the book in the library, and it captured my interest. Sissy is so strange, and spiteful, for seemly no reason. And who is Teresa? Why is Ali's aunt trying to hide that she ever existed????

Kayce Champion 

Dannie W

Just before summer begins, 13-year-old Ali finds an odd photograph in the attic. She knows the two children in it are her mother, Claire, and her aunt Dulcie. But who’s the third person, the one who’s been torn out of the picture? Ali figures she’ll find out while she’s vacationing in Maine with Dulcie and her four-year-old daughter, Emma, in the house where Ali’s mother’s family used to spend summers. All hopes for relaxation are quashed shortly after their arrival, though, when the girls meet Sissy, a kid who’s mean and spiteful and a bad influence on Emma. Strangest of all, Sissy keeps talking about a girl named Teresa who drowned under mysterious circumstances back when Claire and Dulcie were kids, and whose body was never found. At first Ali thinks Sissy’s just trying to scare her with a ghost story, but soon she discovers the real reason why Sissy is so angry. . . . Mary Downing Hahn is at her chilling best in this new supernatural tale that’s certain to send shivers down her readers’ spines.

Deep and dark and dangerous

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