Help me remember this book
August 21, 2012 7:52 AM Subscribe
Help me remember this book that I checked out of the library... ghost story set in New England (I think Maine, but I'm not positive), begins in more or less present day, with an old woman telling the story of the summer she was a teenager and fell in love for the first time. Most of the story takes place in that summer, but also a lot of scenes from the mid-to-late 1800s.
I remember a lot about the story, but no names or anything that seems helpful in a google or Amazon search:
- The girl, her stepmother, and half-brother are sent up to the town where the girl's mother's family lives. Father stays in Boston. Stepmother doesn't get along with girl's grandparents, so rather than stay with them, they rent a house that turns out to be haunted. Only the girl can see the ghost, of course.
-Girl cuts her hair boy-short in rebellion.
-She falls in love with a local boy from a poor family. He has a little sailboat, and they go out to an island to go clamming, and get stranded by the tide. The island is also haunted, and the boy can also see the ghosts.
-Flashbacks to the 1800s family (related to the boy in some way?)... girl from the mainland falls in love with man from the island, but when they marry it turns out that he's from a very fundamentalist family, and they're cruel to her. The ghost story is related to a murder in that family, and the haunted house was the schoolhouse from that island, relocated to the mainland.
-The boy "borrows" a flashy car from a rich man he works for, and he and the girl drive it to the state fair, and think about running away, but decide to return home, and pick up a passenger (hitchhiker?) on the way with traditional ghost story results.
-I'm 90% sure that I listened to it as an audiobook, if that's any help. I thought that it was within the last year that I checked it out, but nothing on my library record going back a year rings a bell. Within the last 2 or 3 years, anyway, and while it wasn't on the new release shelf, I don't think it was terribly old, either. May have been YA, but I think it wasn't labelled that way.
Seems like more than enough information to identify the book, but I can't find it!
I remember a lot about the story, but no names or anything that seems helpful in a google or Amazon search:
- The girl, her stepmother, and half-brother are sent up to the town where the girl's mother's family lives. Father stays in Boston. Stepmother doesn't get along with girl's grandparents, so rather than stay with them, they rent a house that turns out to be haunted. Only the girl can see the ghost, of course.
-Girl cuts her hair boy-short in rebellion.
-She falls in love with a local boy from a poor family. He has a little sailboat, and they go out to an island to go clamming, and get stranded by the tide. The island is also haunted, and the boy can also see the ghosts.
-Flashbacks to the 1800s family (related to the boy in some way?)... girl from the mainland falls in love with man from the island, but when they marry it turns out that he's from a very fundamentalist family, and they're cruel to her. The ghost story is related to a murder in that family, and the haunted house was the schoolhouse from that island, relocated to the mainland.
-The boy "borrows" a flashy car from a rich man he works for, and he and the girl drive it to the state fair, and think about running away, but decide to return home, and pick up a passenger (hitchhiker?) on the way with traditional ghost story results.
-I'm 90% sure that I listened to it as an audiobook, if that's any help. I thought that it was within the last year that I checked it out, but nothing on my library record going back a year rings a bell. Within the last 2 or 3 years, anyway, and while it wasn't on the new release shelf, I don't think it was terribly old, either. May have been YA, but I think it wasn't labelled that way.
Seems like more than enough information to identify the book, but I can't find it!
Response by poster: Yes! That's it! Thank you, I've been trying to remember that for weeks.
posted by Kriesa at 8:26 AM on August 21, 2012
posted by Kriesa at 8:26 AM on August 21, 2012
Glad I could help - looks like an interesting book!
posted by halcyonday at 9:05 AM on August 21, 2012
posted by halcyonday at 9:05 AM on August 21, 2012
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"Hannah Gray has decided, finally, to leave a record of the passionate and long-ago summer in Dundee when she met Conary Crocker, the town bad boy and love of her life. But their joy is mixed with something frightening when they discover an angry spirit inhabiting the house her stepmother has rented for the summer."
posted by halcyonday at 7:56 AM on August 21, 2012 [1 favorite]