The Unquiet Past

October 1, 2015

Gr 7 Up-In 1964, a girls' orphanage burns to the ground and its seven oldest residents, each armed with a cryptic clue about her past, are sent out into the world to make their way. Each entry in the "Secrets" series of seven linked YA novels details a different girl's rocky start. In Walters's Innocent, Lizzy is offered a job in her hometown, where she discovers that her father, having murdered her mother, is still doing time in the local prison. Drawn to him despite warnings from her seemingly kind employer, the protagonist discovers a cover-up involving nearly the entire town. Although it gets off to a slow start, this volume delivers some tense moments as Lizzy makes her way through the local web of lies. Armstrong's The Unquiet Past features a creepy supernatural element. Tess's search for the meaning of her waking visions leads her to an abandoned mental hospital, a series of illegal experiments, and a boy who's looking for answers of his own. These installments target reluctant readers with their short sentences, plot-driven events, and light character development. VERDICT Purchase where historical fiction is popular.-Elizabeth Friend, Wester Middle School, TX

Copyright 2015 School Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

July 15, 2015
An orphan with visons seeks her past in a Gothic 1964 Quebec. Sixteen-year-old Tess (for Therese) has always wanted to travel, but that doesn't mean she wants to be forced from her home. When the Benevolent Home for Necessitous Girls in Ontario burns down, she's turfed out with a bare-bones clue ("Each of you seven older girls has something from your past," explains the matron, linking this novel to the other six books in the Secrets series). Armed with a disconnected phone number and an address in rural Quebec, Tess braves the train, bothered only by the ghosts she's seen all her life. The address holds no easy answers to either her past or her visions; it's merely a photogenic abandoned mansion, filled with crumbling psychiatry books and long since ravaged by locals. Her investigation of the ruin is interrupted by a hostile squatter, who threatens her with violence. Jackson disbelieves Tess' tale though he refuses to explain his own secrets as a broke, filthy teenager who's exceedingly well-spoken in both French and English-often to the point of irritating pedantry. Tess' visions and their findings in the creepy basement lead her to suspect pulp-novel medical shenanigans, which themselves devolve into a frankly absurd deus ex machina conclusion. Unlike the cackling villainy of the back story, the realistic landscape of racist microagressions that plague Metis Jackson is heartbreakingly matter-of-fact. A compelling mystery unevenly executed. (Historical fiction. 12-14)

COPYRIGHT(2015) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.