5-star rating on Reader Views

 The Secret of Spirit Lake by Jane Haltmaier is a coming-of-age mystery that offers teen and  young adult readers  exciting secrets and chilling revelations. Through the alternating perspective,  this novel highlights the challenges that the girls face—Amy’s difficulties of being the new girl  in Spirit Lake and Penny’s fight for survival as she finds herself in a dire situation. The addition  of a ghostly form adds another layer of intrigue as it becomes the proverbial glue that bonds the  girls.    Calling all amateur investigators! Readers who adore digging for information and piecing  together clues will be immersed in this thrilling novel, from ghostly encounters to uncovering  lost letters to DNA results. Haltmaier leaves no stone unturned in revealing the mystery of Spirit  Lake. Amy and her new friends are determined to help Sally uncover what happened to Penny  and the children she nannied, and they go to great depths to connect all the dots. I was rooting for  them every step of the way!  Readers will be impressed by the level of character evolution. Penny, in particular, goes through  an earth-shattering transition when she is plucked from her comfortable life, suffers a tragedy,  and then fights for survival in horrific conditions. The author masterfully illustrates the   tremendous role hope plays in self-preservation, and readers will be inspired by the young  woman’s strength and resourcefulness when all the odds are stacked against her.  As we get closer to spooky season, Jane Haltmaier’s The Secret of Spirit Lake is the perfect  teen/YA mystery to cozy up with. Expertly paced with an intriguing premise, you may find it  difficult to tear yourself away from this novel!  

 The Secret of Spirit Lake earned a 2nd place award in the Bookfest contest.

In The Secret of Spirit Lake, a young adult mystery with a gentle paranormal twist, we follow fourteen-year-old Amy, yanked away from her old life and dropped into a big yellow Victorian on a quiet Virginia lake. She ends up in the tower bedroom, where strange things start happening that point to a girl named Sally who used to live there. The story moves back and forth between Amy’s present-day summer of swim practices, new friends, and family tension, and the late 1930s life of a farm girl named Penny whose path slowly, uneasily, begins to overlap with the lake and the house Amy now calls home. The mystery sits in the space between those timelines, asking what really happened at Spirit Lake and what it means for the people still living there.

I really liked how the book uses that alternating structure. At first I was more invested in Amy, mostly because her voice feels so familiar: grumpy about her parents, irritated by younger siblings, convinced no one understands her, then slowly softening as she gets pulled into swim team life and real friendship. But Penny’s chapters crept up on me. Her world is harder and narrower, full of chores and exhaustion, and then that terrible fire that takes her parents hits with real emotional weight. The mystery works because those two stories start to rhyme. Amy is lonely and displaced; Penny is lonely and trapped. Sally is caught between them as a literal ghost, but also as this symbol of what happens when adults fail kids. The writing itself is clean and straightforward, the kind of YA prose that trusts younger readers to keep up while still feeling approachable. Short chapters keep things moving, and the ghost scenes are eerie without ever turning into nightmare fuel. There is a soft, almost cozy feel to a lot of the pages, even when the subject matter is dark.

What stood out to me most was the way the author chose to center safety and care instead of just creepiness. The ghost is sad more than scary, and the book keeps circling back to the question of who looks out for children when their parents can’t or won’t. You see it in Penny’s encounters with the state worker at the hospital, who is doing her best inside a rigid system, and in how Lucy and Henry neglect and emotionally abuse Hal and Millie behind the façade of a beautiful lake house. You see it again in Amy’s realization that her “annoying” little siblings are actually kind of adorable when she lets herself pay attention, and that her parents, while imperfect, are trying very hard to give their family a better life. As a YA mystery, the book leans more emotional than plot-twist-heavy, and sometimes the coincidences that help the girls solve the decades-old case feel a little convenient, but the emotional payoffs mostly earned my trust. I cared more about Millie hugging her long-lost brother on a sunny balcony than about every logistical detail lining up perfectly.

By the end, I felt like I’d spent a summer at the lake myself, watching Amy grow into her own skin, cheering through swim meets, and then sitting up way too late trying to fit together scraps of diaries and old letters with her and her friends. The paranormal element stays light, but the feelings underneath are not. The Secret of Spirit Lake is the kind of YA mystery I’d hand to a thoughtful middle schooler or young teen who likes ghost stories that are more about healing than horror, or to adults who enjoy warm, character-driven young adult fiction with a bit of intrigue. It would fit well in school and library book clubs, especially with readers who are ready to talk about grief, neglect, and found family in a safe way.

Rating: 5