In this fun paranormal romp with thoughtful themes about family and change, 13-year-old Luna Catalano’s two moms are home improvement influencers, specializing in flipping haunted houses. They move from house to house, renovating and ridding the homes of supposed ghosts before selling them to new owners. But Luna, a budding paranormal investigator, found out that her moms were faking the hauntings. She exposed them on a livestream, causing a drop in sponsorships and tension in the family. (This isn’t a spoiler, as it is revealed right at the beginning.) Luna’s friends in the local Paranormal Club also abandoned her after “The Incident”; her only social connections now are two friends she knows virtually, after they connected online over their shared irritable bowel syndrome (IBS).
Now, after moving halfway across the country to another house, her moms are trying to reposition their show as more purely entertaining. Caught up in trying to secure new sponsorships, they don’t want Luna involved after what she did. Luna feels lonely and retreats into her drawings and books, but eventually connects with several neighbor kids and a young woman who likes to tell ghost stories.
Soon, however, Luna starts to experience disturbing happenings in the home: strange noises, sinister messages, an infestation of spiders, unexpected fires, visions of blood, and more. Could the ghosts here actually be real?
Luna’s moms, who don’t really believe in ghosts, think she’s causing all of the chaos, and the trust between them and her fractures further. Luna tries to enlist her new friends to figure out what is going on and end to it. But can she do so before the force behind the happenings unleashes further horrors?
While all of this is transpiring, Luna begins to realize that, although she had previously thought of herself as a queer ally, she is developing a crush on one of the girls she has met in the neighborhood. While Luna isn’t afraid of parental rejection, “I’m scared people will think I’m trying to be queer just because my moms are,” she says. This is indeed a real fear among at least some “second-gen” queer people, as Abigail Garner’s Families Like Mine (among other sources) has shown. Few middle grade books have touched on this, however, and author Justine Pucella Winans is to be commended for a perceptive take on Luna’s journey to being comfortable with her bisexual identity as the child of queer parents. Additionally, a different new friend is “trying out they/them pronouns,” and Winans shows how the youths find support in each other even though their queer identities are not identical. It’s a nice touch.
The mystery and creepiness here make for a compelling tale, and Winans carefully paces the reveals through additional “play within a play” ghost stories as well as Luna’s own experiences. Underlying the plot of this highly recommended book, however, is a thoughtful examination of how people can unintentionally hurt the ones they love, how we can heal, and what it means to make a house a home.
Content warning: This is a ghost story, and while I don’t believe there’s anything that is generally inappropriate for the target middle grade age group, potential readers (and their adults) should know that there are some horror elements, references to past deaths, and one brief mention (without further detail) of a cruel person who set animals on fire.
Luna and one mom have white skin; the other has “golden-brown” skin and Italian and Brazilian heritage; one pair of new friends is Latine.
