COLD IN SUMMER
by Tracy Barrett
No way does Ariadne want to spend her seventh-grade year in a hick town in Tennessee just because her mom got a job at the university there. She’s lonesome, missing her best friend back in Florida. When she meets a girl with a long braid and wearing a faded blue dress and brown boots alone in the woods, who says she lives where “it’s cold in summer and warm in winter,” Ariadne feels strangely drawn to her. Intrigued by the murky 100-foot-deep lake where her family lives, Adriadne’s social-studies project on the creation of the lake and the dead town underneath it becomes the eddy that swirls the mysterious circumstances together. Is the girl, May Butler, a ghost? How can Ariadne take her home? Plenty of foreshadowing and obvious clues point to the answers, but it’s not where the plot goes, rather how it gets there that makes the story compelling. A genuine ghost story without coincidental explanations that will draw readers eerily in. (Fiction. 10-14)