The Doll in the Garden: A Ghost Story

Packaging is very good. Quality of print, paper, cover design also good. My book's cover design is different.This story is suitable for young readers. (8 --14 Years)

My 10 year old daughter has recently gotten into “creepy” mystery books and we randomly picked this one out together. We have read it together (I always read with her to make sure certain stories aren’t too scary to prevent nightmares) we really loved this book. It has a good plot, a little bit of drama as well and some situations that kids can relate to. The short version is, a little girl is moving with her mom to a new home due to her dad sadly passing away. The mom can’t afford much and they end up renting a room from a very mean old lady who turned her house into an apartment. The little girl makes a friend who is convinced the garden is haunted. Weird unexplainable things keep happening and the little girl finds a doll buried in the garden that actually ends up being the old woman’s best friend from her childhood that also passed away. She uncovers why the old woman is so mean and why she had the doll and who it belonged to. Good story to read with your child if they like mysteries.

This book must have been for one of my kids book reports. Grade 4-7-- A young girl helps her cantankerous elderly landlord to resolve a childhood act that caused the woman lifelong guilt. Ashley follows a white cat back in time and meets Louisa, a girl who is dying and who longs for her beloved doll--a doll that Ashley and her friend Kristi have found buried in Miss Cooper's garden. In the end Ashley, Kristi, and Miss Cooper visit Louisa; the woman is able to make am mends with her childhood friend, and Ashley begins to accept her father's death. Hahn's portrayal of crotchety Miss Cooper is expertly drawn, giving vivid insight into why she acts and lives as she does. Ashley, her widowed mother, and Kristi are also fully realized characters. When Hahn sticks to her story, it moves along at a steady, scary clip. However, when she lapses into lengthy descriptions of flowers, birds, and landscape, she slows the pace of the story rather than creates the intended atmosphere. Ashley's first-person narrative often gets bogged down in a flowery adult voice, particularly in the descriptions: "As still as the cherub behind me, I watched the leaves sway in the breeze. Sunlight and shadow mottled the ground, and the weeds whispered to themselves, lulling me like distant voices of children at play." Still, it's an imaginative ghost story, fairly predictable, but with a completely satisfying ending.

I bought this book for my granddaughter who loves spooky books. She loved it!

Nice

So, for Mary Downing Hahn fans, this one is not creepy and scary, as much as it is sort of bittersweet and supernatural.It's not a very long read, but it has any number of classic Hahn traits - the heroine is of a familiar type, the elderly person who knows something but won't tell, the younger kid being dragged along - and it's enjoyable. I think it works better in this format than it would as a full-length novel.I also LOVE Snowball the cat, and his role in the whole mystery. I thought it was beautifully done.There do seem to be a lot of typos/scan errors in the book, but they aren't too distracting. It looks more like a OCR scan issue than actual lack of editing.