Maddie's Ghost

by Carol Fisher Saller

Overview

Madeleine "Lainie" Stanton is about to become a local celebrity. Born at precisely midnight at the millennium, she's turning 12, and a TV station wants an interview. But when the reporter finds out Lainie's great-grandmother Madeleine was hanged for murder, the story threatens to blow up into something quite different. Racing against time to prove her ancestor was framed, Lainie and her two best friends follow clues that seem to come in a shocking way-from Madeleine herself.

MADDIE'S GHOST is middle-grade fiction, contemporary and historical psychological suspense, woven around a young girl's race to solve a 1930s mystery involving her great-grandmother.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9798986235387
Publisher:	Duckweed Books
Publication date:	08/15/2023
Pages:	248
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.69(d)
Age Range:	8 - 12 Years

About the Author

Carol Fisher Saller lives in Chicago. Honors include Bankstreet Best Books, Kirkus Best, Horn Book Recommended Verse, the Carl Sandburg Award for Children's Literature, and Chicago Public Library's Best Teen Fiction.

Editorial Reviews

2024-03-11
In Saller’s middle-grade novel, a tween and her friends race against time to restore her great-grandmother’s good name.

The Stanton family—11-year-old Lainie, Lainie’s widowed dad, Grandpa Jack, Uncle Daniel, and Uncle Patrick—live in a quirky old mansion in Kenwood, Ohio, and have an unusual tragedy in their past. Back in the 1930s, Lainie’s great-grandmother and namesake, Madeleine, was convicted of murdering her supervisor, a pharmacologist. Maddie pleaded self-defense, but the jury discounted her plea and sentenced her to death. After a TV reporter tricks Lainie into an interview about Maddie, the tween swears on air to clear her great-grandmother’s name. A lot depends on Maddie’s little blue diary, which has gone missing, along with some loose papers inside it that contain key evidence. Complicating things further is the fact that Maddie’s youngest child, Cicely (aka Gracie), hid the book decades ago, fearing her mother’s anger for her drawing in it; the child was kidnapped shortly after Maddie’s death, and was only found in an asylum years later. As Lainie and school friends Elle Mendez and Seth Watson investigate, the fun is in the details of discovery, as well as the crush that Lainie has on dreamy Seth (and her angst about it). This is not Saller’s first foray into the mystery genre, which she knows her way around well, but it does stretch credulity a bit that, in the mid-20th century, the state of Ohio would have so easily executed a widow with four young children who’d never committed a crime before. The characterization of the fiercely protective Stanton household is appealing, however, and Saller’s descriptions of their house as a Gothic Victorian treasure of hidden hallways, stairways, cubbyholes, and hidden levers to open hidden doors are wonderful. Every few chapters, the book includes check-ins about the fortunes of the little blue diary, which plays a key role in the narrative.

A fine mystery with winsome characters and a complicated old house, but one that requires some suspension of disbelief.

Kirkus Reviews