Shadow Girl
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- $7.99
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- $7.99
Publisher Description
The Memory Key author Liana Liu delivers a thrilling story of one girl struggling to claim her own identity while becoming an unwitting participant in the strange fate of a wealthy dynasty.
The house on Arrow Island is full of mystery.
Yet, when Mei arrives, she can’t help feeling relieved. She’s happy to spend the summer in an actual mansion tutoring a rich man’s daughter if it means a break from her normal life—her needy mother, her delinquent brother, their tiny apartment in the city. And Ella Morison seems like an easy charge, sweet and well behaved.
What she doesn’t know is that something is very wrong in the Morison household.
Though Mei tries to focus on her duties, she becomes increasingly distracted by the family’s problems and her own complicated feelings for Ella’s brother, Henry. But most disturbing of all are the unexplained noises she hears at night—the howling and thumping and cries.
Mei is a sensible girl. She isn’t superstitious; she doesn’t believe in ghosts. Yet she can’t shake her fear that there is danger lurking in the shadows of this beautiful house, a darkness that could destroy the family inside and out...and Mei along with them.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The industrious heroine of Liu's second novel (called Mei in the book's jacket copy, but unnamed in the story itself) spends her summers working as an academic tutor anything to help the family make ends meet after her father disappeared. When the wealthy Morison family invites her to tutor their daughter on Arrow Island for the summer, the money is too good pass up, even though her Chinese mother wants her to stay at home. But after the recent high school graduate arrives, everything about the Morisons and their house is strange: eight-year-old tutee Ella seems to be hiding something, older brother Henry acts awkward and stilted, the Morison parents are in marital distress, and Ella claims that a ghost haunts the house. Despite the haunted house hook and the atmospheric island setting, Liu's story is slow to gain momentum, which again slackens during an interlude in which the girl returns to her home in the city. The addition of a romance between Liu's heroine and Henry further clutters this novel of a family forced to face its demons. Ages 13 up.