The Whispering House by Rebecca Wade is an eerie, creepy story about a house inhabited by a 14 year old girl, Hannah, her parents, and the ghost of a little girl who died almost 200 years ago. The house seems normal enough, until Hannah starts having dreams and visions that cause her to investigate the off-limits rooms in her new Victorian house. Her best friend, Sam, helps her unlock doors, and inside they discover a (voodoo?) doll. This leads them on an adventure to uncover the truth about this little girl's death and the family member who may have murdered her.
I had moments of spine-tingling, hair-raising terror during parts of this book, as Hannah becomes more and more involved with investigating this ghostly presence. I'm easily scared, and Wade does a good job of drawing out some of the more suspenseful plot points.
That said, I had two concerns with the novel. First, Hannah and Sam are written to be fourteen, and they just didn't ring true to the narrative at all. Though the line is blurry between children's and young adult literature--marketing? audience?--this was certainly children's literature, and Hannah and Sam could have been ten or eleven and the story wouldn't have been much different.
Second, though Hannah is the main focalizing character, when the going gets tough there at the end, with all of the clues sort of falling together and the mystery seems to be coming to a close, it is Sam who does most of the acting and solving. He sort of takes over while Hannah just kinda...fades into the background. There is a somewhat legitimate reason plot-wise for this to be happening, but honestly, I was more just annoyed that the guy took over even though the girl had done most of the work up until that point.
This isn't the greatest horror story ever told, not even for kid, and part of the resolution is a little too simple, but the haunted house piece was interesting enough to keep my attention.
