In Margaret Ann and the Reckoning, Cindy Cortez Prieto drops readers into a cemetery where death is not an ending so much as a strange continuation: Margaret Ann, a dead girl living among other spirits with her grandpa and her friends Hazel and Marco, investigates the suspicious death of wealthy Florence Mason while also facing the return of the Gazer, a malevolent force hunting her essence. The book braids a murder puzzle with a supernatural struggle, and that combination gives it an unusually lively pulse for a ghost story aimed at younger readers.

What I liked most was the book’s tonal oddity in the best sense. It can be eerie, then playful, then unexpectedly tender. Prieto has a real affection for her cemetery world, and that affection keeps the novel from turning merely grim. I liked the way the dead still squabble, joke, investigate, worry, and form makeshift family bonds. That emotional logic matters more than strict realism here, and it gives the story a homespun sincerity that I found winning. Hazel, in particular, adds warmth, and Margaret Ann’s mix of bravery, irritation, curiosity, and vulnerability keeps the novel from feeling embalmed in sweetness.

I also appreciated the novel’s willingness to be melodramatic. The wicked voices, the family greed, the spectral menace, the sense that a child detective can step straight from library research into metaphysical peril, none of it is shy. Sometimes the prose is a little blunt, and some scenes land with more earnestness than polish, but there is energy in that directness. The book doesn’t smirk at its own haunted premise. It commits. And because it commits, the spooky set pieces and emotional beats have a kind of old-fashioned crackle. And that makes the story vivid.

I would hand this to middle-grade and young YA readers who enjoy paranormal mystery, ghost adventure, supernatural suspense, cemetery fiction, and kid-detective stories with a strong streak of heart. Readers who like Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book may recognize a similar fascination with childhood among the dead, though Prieto’s novel is less lyrical and more openly earnest, with a warmer, more familial glow. This is a spooky-hearted mystery that prefers soul to slickness, and that is its own kind of magic.

Pages: 143 | ASIN ‏ : ‎ B0GQ6V5D7P