Twelve-year-old Eliot Katayama, a biracial Japanese American girl, is grieving for Babung, her paternal grandmother, who died recently after struggling with dementia. Eliot feels that she lost her “before she was even really gone.” She wants to find a way to speak with Babung again, to “make sure she remembers all the things she forgot,” but that may not be easy in their family’s new home on the East Coast, thousands of miles away from where Babung died in California. Her parents don’t understand her obsession with ghosts and can’t seem to find a way to help Eliot as she bears her grief.
Eliot then encounters neighbor Mrs. Delvaux and her granddaughter, Hazel, who live in the supposedly haunted Honeyfield Hall. Despite the strange dwelling and the rumors that Mrs. Delvaux is a witch, Eliot finds it easier to make friends with Hazel than with the girls in the local middle school. And the ghosts of Honeyfield Hall, it turns out, are real.
The ghosts are trapped there, however, losing their memories, and unable to move on as they should. Eliot enlists Hazel’s aid to try and help them, lured by the promise that the ghosts could carry a message to Babung. A fearsome monster threatens both ghosts and Hall, however, and the two girls must unravel the mystery and help the trapped spirits, even as their feelings for each other deepen.
This is a haunting but ultimately hopeful story about grief and love, history and memory, ghosts and living. Spooky but not deeply scary, it includes some slow, satisfying revelations and carries a message about what it means to live our full truths.
