That summer, Jake's twelfth, Uncle Calvin invites Jake, Jake's new friend Billy and Calvin's old friend Lexington, to join a ghost hunting club. On Saturday nights, the club meets up and visits different "haunted" areas throughout Niagara Falls and beyond. These areas all seem to hold something in common, other than just being haunted, and the reader can feel the dread of a secret being slowly unraveled. We can see it in the uncertainty of Uncle Calvin, in the quietness of Lexington, in the slow realizations that come to light for Jake. Jake's past and present interconnect through stories of his patients. They are well though out, touching, emotional moments that lend understanding to Jake's Uncle and the pain he hides from. They also remind us that Jake's memory is fluid and therefore he is an unreliable narrator. The whole story is being revealed from his past, from memories that are old, and Jake has already explained that the older the memories the more likely the brain is creating rather than remembering. As is especially seen in Jake's memory of the screaming caves and the ghost girl. However, this does not deter from the story, from the feelings it provokes or the reality of the situation that Jake finds himself in with his Uncle. It does not take away from the eeriness as they search for ghosts and reveal long hidden hurts. This novel focuses less on real ghosts and more on the effect that fear and memory play on the human senses. Fear forces one to believe something terrible and give life to it, when the likelihood of it being real is improbable. Memory is explored as something easily altered, either to protect a person from something that would shatter them or to make monsters, which may never have actually been witnessed, real. This novel focuses on the ghosts that people create as a means of coping, or the ghosts of who we once were as children, when we grow up and lose that innocence we once took for granted. It is in his twelfth year that Jake confronts his own fears, learns of a brutal past and grows up, forever saying goodbye to his childhood. This book is short, but there is so much meat to the story that you will come out feeling as though you have read a tome of a book. One of the best, if not the best, books i have read this year. I highly recommend reading this wonderful novel.
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