Book: Peculiar Incident on Shady Street

There is a second ghost story in this year's Mark Twain Award list from the Missouri School Librarians Association. This one is not quite as disturbing as One for Sorrow, but it is a page turner nevertheless.

From the author's website:

When the rain starts.
When the lights go out.
That's when the trouble begins...

​Tessa Woodward isn't exactly thrilled to move to rainy, cold Chicago from her home in sunny Florida.  But homesickness turns to icy fear when unexplainable things start happening in her new house.  Things like flickering lights, mysterious drawings appearing out of nowhere, and a crackling noise she can feel in her bones.

​When her little brother's doll starts crying real tears, Tessa realizes that someone - or something - is trying to communicate with her.  A secret that's been shrouded in mystery for more than one hundred years.

With the help of three new friends, Tessa begins unraveling the mystery of what happened in the house on Shady Street - and more importantly, what it has to do with her!

The author tried a little too hard to make this about a girl who moves to a new location in the U.S. when it really wasn't necessary.  There's a couple of characters that are pretty unnecessary, too, having very little to do with the story.

As I said, this was a pretty good page turner - that is, right up until the end, when things suddenly were solved, over, and dropped.  Just when I was expecting a big revelation in the end, the solution to appeasing the ghost was really quite simple, and then it was all over.  I wish there were more of a resounding conclusion to an otherwise decent story of investigation and mystery.