A review by a_ab
The Girl and the Ghost by Hanna Alkaf

4.0

This book was an unexpected and fascinating page-turner. I also found it deeper and more nuanced than most books written got young audiences. I also loved the writing and the masterful capturing of most pertinent details to convey the essence of each scene — it made the characters and their surroundings so vivid I could easily envision them as I read, so the whole book felt almost like a movie. Sustaining such visual and storytelling integrity so evenly throughout the whole book is quite an achievement. 

I am not sure how I felt about mental health issues being explained away by supernatural phenomena, and about therapy being discredited and dismissed, but I did appreciate the allegorical representation of familial trauma and cycles of abuse and neglect passed down through generations.