Oh wow. For once, I am speechless. I am a woman in my 30s, and I couldn't put this down. Neurodivergent characters, references to beloved musicals and classic literature, all mixed together with a paranormal feel like Coraline that leaves you reeling and confused as to which scenario is really happening where you just. Can't. Put. It. Down!??! Yes. Yes please to all of this. I can't wait for my kid to be old enough to read this. She will be so overjoyed to read a book with characters like her, and the poor kid will probably be up late with a flashlight under her covers to finish it, just like me (except I'm lucky enough to be reading this on my phone in the dark in the middle of the night ;)
Read this. Seriously. You won't regret it. Except I regret it ending...now I just want to read it again. And maybe beg for a sequel...

I received this book for free for an honest review from netgalley #netgalley
Such a sweet story with good morals thrown in too. Witty and exciting.

I loved the proligue and descriptions
I liked the characters and dialogue. I was interested but not hooked.

Thought the premise and setting are definitely my typical preference, I felt like this story was a bit lacking. It felt about 100 pages too long, and I could never tell if the old woman was supposed to be seen as sinister or not.

Cool premise, some slightly annoying characters. While predictable and better in some parts than others, still an enjoyable read. It feels a little too convoluted for younger readers, but too immature for older kids. This seems to sit somewhere in the ether between.

One girl moves into a new home... but that home has a creepy dollhouse and ghosts.. and mysteries that begin to haunt her. Alice is forced to move after her parents decide to start getting a divorce. Alice and her mother head into a small town where her mother can work as a live-in nurse to a rich elderly lady. The house they move into is regarded as somewhat haunted. It is a huge, imposing house that is kinda spooky but kept in perfect shape. Things begin to get weird for Alice when she finds a dollhouse in the attic that is an exact replica of the house she’s living in... and she wakes up to a ghost girl that looks like one of the dolls in the dollhouse... Overall an interesting middle-grade read filled with a little bit of haunting and a little bit of ghosts and a lot of mystery.

*Thanks Netgalley and Penguin Random House Canada for sending me an arc in exchange for an honest review*

This is a cute children’s ghost story. It was very well written. I will be recommending this to people at work.

I love a middle-grade ghost story, and was looking forward to a suitably creepy little tale here. Unfortunately, I struggled to connect with this book in the way I have to other spooky stories for the age group.
My main problem, I think, was the dialogue. None of the characters, especially the adult characters, felt ‘real’ to me, or like they had a fully formed voice; oddly enough, I had the fewest problems with the dialogue during the dreamlike sections where Alice (our protagonist) interacts with ghosts.
I also felt uncomfortable with the way developmental disability featured in the story. I know from the author’s note that Cotter based her disabled characters on a real-life girl she knew, and consulted with that girl’s mother and sibling to get things right, and I don’t want to speak for them; however, the depictions of Lily and Bubble, the two developmentally delayed girls in the story, played into several tropes that made me raise my eyebrows. There’s a long history of people with cognitive disabilities being portrayed as extra-sensitive to magic/ghosts/otherworldliness in fiction, and while often well-meaning, it’s so closely interrelated to harmful and ableist narratives about who’s normal and who’s ‘other’ that I felt uncomfortable watching Lily function as our protagonist’s ‘spirit guide’ or ‘guardian angel’ at points in the story.