IN B’ TWEEN

A resident of a haunted house becomes a ghost herself in Banerjee’s sequel to her No. 7novel series.

Priya and Ravi Gupta died in a house fire. Now a spirit, Priya gets to the gates of Heaven but isn’t allowed to stay. She wanders freely on Earth and decides to go to London and watch over her adult children, Sonya and Sunny, who used to be close but can’t stand each other anymore. Priya stays mostly with Sonya, invisibly watching as she sets off on a short trip with her friends to Abingdon, England, to ponder her own future. There, Sonya meets the handsome, charming Randy, a cousin of her recent ex-boyfriend Paul. Paul tells her to stay away from him, but Sonya doesn’t listen; Randy seems sweet, and when Sonya gets tragic news, he flies to India with her to accompany her to a funeral. Meanwhile, Sonya’s determined to figure out how to break a terrible family curse, put there by her Uncle Dev after he performed black magic on a book given to Priya. The only way to put an end to the tragedies plaguing her family is to locate that tome. Meanwhile, the devil is hunting for souls like Priya’s, and the truth about Randy slowly starts to reveal itself. Banerjee’s use of a ghost narrator results in an effectively offbeat and sometimes otherworldly storytelling experience, as when Priya swims in the sea after being cast out of Heaven: “I swirled in eddies that spanned hundreds of miles, rode atop waves, rising, falling, rising, until at dawn, I rolled in off the coast with the roaring breakers….I clung to the weathered rocks, a wisp amidst a bounty of subtle hues.” However, because Priya’s mostly following her daughter’s journey, the narration tends to lack introspection. There are occasional moments of formality that come across awkwardly (“ ‘Oh, come on,’ I said a trifle irritably”), and it takes a while for narrative momentum to build. Once it gains traction, though, it’s an engaging adventure all the way to the cliffhanger ending.

A slow-starting but often enjoyable supernatural tale of family.