Synopsis
There’s a ghost in the walls, and V must decide if it is an ally or an enemy. The wrong decision could destroy her and her family.
From Schneider Honor Award winning author Meg Eden Kuyatt comes a chilling and insightful novel-in-verse.
After a hard school year, V has been sent to her Grandma Jojo’s house for the summer in order to get away from it all. But unlike neurodivergent, artistic, sock-collecting V, Jojo is uptight, critical, and obsessed with her spotless house. She doesn’t get V at all. V is sure she’s doomed to have the worst summer ever.
Then V starts hearing noises from inside the walls of the house… Knocks, the sounds of a girl crying, and voices echoing in the night.
When V finds a ghostly girl hiding in the walls, they seem to have an immediate connection. This might be V’s chance to get back at her perfect grandmother by messing with her just a little bit.
But the buried secrets go much deeper — and are much more dangerous — than V even suspects. And they threaten to swallow her and her family whole if she can’t find a way to uncover the truth of the girl before it’s too late.
A contemporary novel-in-verse with a ghostly twist by the author of Good Different, this book is about the power — and danger — of secrets. The Girl in the Walls will grab you and not let go until the very last page.
Review
Huge thanks to Scholastic Press for the physical arc of this one! I was drawn right in with the cover art.
This was fantastic. I expected to like it, as middle grade horror is usually a hit for me, but I really loved this. It’s a novel told in verse, which I did not know until I got it in the mail! It really cuts down on things we usually find necessary and proves that they aren’t always. Really concise, engaging, and moving.
V, after getting into trouble at school, is left to spend the summer with her neat-manners-and-all-other-things-freak grandmother, Jojo. As V is different, neurodivergent and trying to find her own way, she’s always butted heads with Jojo, so being left feels like torture. Especially when V finds out her older cousin, Cat, who also doesn’t get along with Jojo, isn’t allowed over. You see, jojo wants everything perfectly prim, otherwise, what would the neighbors think? Yet V just wants to make art and wear silly, fancy socks. Most of all though, Vee wants to be accepted and understood.
So when V finds a ghost of a girl living in Jojo’s walls, one who has been stockpiling her grandmother’s secrets, she finds it hard to say no to playing pranks with her. Even when the girl presses for darker and more intense pranks, disagreements between them push V toward giving in to the anger. If Jojo thinks so low of V, why shouldn’t she get back at her?
Although the ghost ties back into the storyline itself in a ‘history coming back to haunt you’ way, I found that she served as a really good voice for V’s fears, angers, anxieties and even darker processing. Because of how in your face her harsh pranks are, she begins to serve more and more as the big meanie for young readers, doubling down on how wrong anger can be. And while the short pay off may feel good, what Vee really wants is her grandmother’s love.
I found myself actually connecting things the grandmother said and did behaviorally to someone I’ve dealt with in the past. Especially the part about appearances. And this was a really unique way to see different sides to someone that maybe I didn’t think possible in real life. Everyone is multifaceted, and everyone has a past that influenced their present. It actually hit home for me, as I wasn’t allowing myself to view them as what they are just like Jojo didn’t view the real V. This one is light on the scary/horror side of things and real heavy on the emotional family turmoil side.
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