Dead Girl's Diary

Alexander, K. R. Dead Girl's Diary
September 3, 2024 by Scholastic Inc.
Public library copy

Kara has long had creepy visions of memories that are not her own, and she has let her best friend Sienna know about them, since they sometimes stop her in her tracks. When she recieves a package that contains a diary, she shows it to her friend, who claims it is unreadable and written in gibberish. Kara, however, can read it, and know that the writer, Elizabeth Townsend, is the girl in her memories. She and Sienna decide to lie to their parents and travel about a hundred miles to the town where Elizabeth lived, and also where she died in a terrible drowning accident about twelve years ago. When they get to the town, they are surprised at how friendly everyone is. They even run into a boy, Mark, who offers to help them research more about Elizabeth. They lie to him and tell him that they are staying at a hotel at the edge of town with their families when they are really planning on staying in Elizabeth's family's abandoned house, and he shows up with pizza for them. The house is creepy, and Kara hears Elizabeth calling to her. Mark claims that he has visions, too, and offers to take the girls to the lake where Elizabeth drowned. Since Kara is being repeatedly warned to leave town, she thinks about it, but the girls are stuck. They go to the local library, when Mr. Hughes, the librarian, helps them get a lot of information. No one in town seems to think that Elizabeth's best friend, James, was responsible for her death, but dissuade the girls from trying to find him and talk to him, since it was a traumatic experience for him. There was a neighbor, Mr. Pierce, who was the target for increasingly unpleasant pranks that James wanted to pull, but he had been cleared of blame and had recently died. There are plenty of creepy experiences all over town, and when the girls finally try to leave, they are told that there are no busses for weeks. Going back to Elizabeth's house, they find more pages from the diary that lead them to a surprising truth about the town, Elizabeth, and even Kara's past before Kara's parents arrive to save them. 

Strengths: My students love ghost stories, but they don't want nice, gentle ghosts who befriend people and teach them about the past. Oh, no. They want KILLER ghost who follow characters around, get into their heads, and terrorize them! I enjoyed the fact that no parents had to die; the girls run away from home on the bus. That's always an adventure, although I don't want my students to try this at home. This was a bit different from the typical "we've just moved and the house is haunted" tale, which I very much appreciated. There's a more pervasive feeling that something is wrong, and that it extends beyond Elizabeth's tragic death. Alexander's titles are always a sure hit, so make sure that if you are having a Scholastic book fair, you request a whole extra box of his titles. (Which are only available in paperback, which will make an entire generation of avid readers sad.)
Weaknesses: I don't want to give away the twist at the end, but I feel like the town needed a little more explanation. Young readers, however, will be fine with this fast paced story. 
What I really think: Fans of this author's work will rush to pick this one up, and it's a good choice for readers who like killer ghosts with a history, like the ones who mean the main characters harm in Meija's It Happened to Anna, Ford's The Lonely Ghost, Duga's The Ghost in the Headlights, or Brown's The Girl in the Lake, or Priestly's Still Water.