The Ghost Road

I got The Ghost Road because I had enjoyed the author's The Swallow and The Painting, the first two of her books I'd read, so much. The year is 1978. Ruth Windsor is going to be thirteen in December. Her widowed father has remarried and is on his honeymoon, so Ruth has been sent to the very small Buckle, Newfoundland to spend the summer with her great-aunt, Doll Duggan. Half of the Duggan house has electricity, half doesn't. Of course Ruth's bedroom is in the half with no electricity. Her cousin Ruby Peddle is also going to be spending the summer with Aunt Doll, so when a girl brings a lit candle into the bedroom, Ruth assumes it's Ruby. No. From talking to Great-Aunt Doll's friend, Eldred (a great believer in fairies), Ruth finds out a road that she can see, but Ruby can't, is called the Ghost Road. Ruby believes in fairies. Ruth doesn't. Worse, she scoffs. Eventually the girls find out about a family curse that has killed seven generations of their ancestresses, all looking like the Finn sisters with whom it started. Apparently Aunt Doll escaped because she looked like a Duggan. Ruth and Ruby look like Finns, so if they can't break the curse, they'll be next. Ruby's paternal grandmother, Mildred Barrett Peddle, knows when the curse started. It involved her thrice-great uncle, Robert Barrett. Mildred's still bitter that her son George married one of the cursed Finns. She's not interested in saving her own granddaughter. After all, she has three grandsons from George's second wife. Aside from a recurring nightmare where she's saved from an old-time shipwreck, seeing a ghost and the Ghost Road are Ruth's first manifestation of the Sight. Like Mildred, she has visions of the past. They usually involve the more unpleasant deaths of her ancestresses. The ghost she keeps seeing is an ancestress who urges Ruth to break the curse. Ruth and Ruby are very motivated, but it's going to take some detective work as well as Ruth's visions. The atmosphere switches from two tweens having a good time, to menacing, to frightening. The reason for the curse and the persons past the first generation on whom it will fall was horrifying. As with her earlier books, The Ghost Road is a story adults as well as tweens can enjoy. The family curse is monstrous and should give any reader with imagination shudders. This book is particularly good at showing how feuds can last for generations and why well-meaning attempts to keep family skeletons in the closet are a Bad Idea.