Breakfast At Libraries

In Amanda Mason's first novel The Wayward Girls, it's the 1970s and two adolescent girls, Bee and Loo, are living in isolated farmhouse with their bohemian mother Cathy and siblings, Dan, Florian and Anto. While their father Joe, an artist, is away working in Scotland the girls start to hear strange knocking sounds in their shared bedroom ... and then other things start to happen. Marbles are hurled through the air by an invisible force, and furniture moves on its own. Desperate for help, the family become involved with a local photographer and a team of paranormal investigators who make it their mission to find out who, or what, is haunting Iron Syke Farm - and why it seems to manifest so strongly around the girls.

In the present day, Loo is now Lucy and Cathy is in a care home, mostly lucid but in the early stages of dementia. When Cathy has an accident while wandering outside, convinced she has seen the ghostly figure of a young girl in the grounds, Lucy discovers that a group of students want to investigate Iron Syke farm all over again. What might they find there - and what might they awaken?

The 1970s sections of the book form a gripping ghost story in their own right, with strong echoes of the Enfield Poltergeist case, but are also a vivid portrait of two adolescent sisters isolated by their geographical location and their parents' attempt to educate them at home. Their environment is one in which boredom, puberty and sibling rivalry are allowed to intensify and fester - the relationship between the sisters, and their interest in the attentions of the paranormal investigators, is sometimes as heavy with threat as the behaviour of the entity haunting their home.

By contrast, the present day sections have a calmer and more measured feel - less intense, certainly, but no less eerie as Lucy is reluctantly forced to revisit the farm and relive the events that happened there. There's certainly something haunting her, but how much of Lucy's unease is driven by supernatural occurrences at the farm, and how much stems from the guilt, loss and trauma of her past? And what will happen when the past and the present collide?

The Wayward Girls is a novel that repeatedly unseats the reader just as we think we're comfortable in the saddle. It's a chilling read, but it's also a perceptive portrait of a family falling apart and it's a measure of Amanda Mason's skill that, even when the characters' actions seemed cruel, unwise or shocking, I could fully understand and sympathise with their motives - there no heroes or villains in this book, only flawed, confused and sometimes damaged human beings whose behaviour never fails to convince.

The Wayward Girls is an accomplished debut that straddles the boundaries of ghost story, psychological thriller and coming-of-age drama - I look forward to reading more from the same author.

Zaffre Publishing kindly sent me an advance copy of The Wayward Girls to review. This review is my honest opinion and I wasn't paid or otherwise compensated for it.