I have to confess when I first heard Rhiannon Lassiter read an extract of Ghost of a Chance at the OUP Dark Fantasy event I didn't quite engage with it. Maybe it was sitting on a hard floor, maybe it was the wine I'd drunk, maybe it was just being overawed by such august company. But whatever it was, I felt entirely differently when I actually got my hands on the book and started to read.
Eva Chance, the hero, lives in the House. It's always referred to like that, the House. It's been inhabited by Chances for generations and is falling to bits and Eva's grandfather is now too old, frail and, frankly, poor to do anything much about it. Eva half loves, half hates the House. She's spent too much of her time there, raised by her grandfather and without any friends her own age. She has friends, of sorts, in the ghosts that inhabit the House, ghosts that nobody else can see and as the novel progresses she starts to think that maybe she can see them so clearly because she has in fact become one of them. That's the only explanation she can come up with for why all the live inhabitants and visitors to the House act as if she isn't there. The only problem she has is that she can't remember ever dying.
And that sets her off on her search to find out what happened. On the way she meets an assortment of helpful and distinctly unhelpful ghosts, falls in love with a living boy, Kyle, and with his help takes on the might and venom of the witch in the House cellar. Now, that all makes for an impressively eerie and spine chilling ghost story and one that has you struggling all the way to the end wondering how the author is going to bring that ghost-human love story to a successful conclusion.
But this is not just a ghost story. There is a whole cast of assorted live Chance relations, all of whom seem to have motives for killing off Eva, her grandad, and anyone else who might get in the way so that they can get their hands on the House. There's also a rather androgynous house agent, Kyle's sister, their dad and a bunch of pretty incompetent police officers. Oh, and a couple of murders and attempted murders too. All of which means that the story is as much a mystery as it is a ghost story, and as such it trots along at a pretty pace and keeps you guessing right to the end.
I won't give away the ending, that wouldn't be fair, but I will say that, for me, it didn't quite live up to everything that came before. The witch was such a wonderful creation, depicted with real menace, so I think I found her demise a bit of a disappointment, and as to the resolution of the mystery, well, it just stretched this reader's imagination a bit too far.
Having said that, this is a fantastic foray into young adult fiction, There are some truly scary bits and some wonderfully atmospheric writing. And as an example of gothic it introduces a raft of interesting new ideas which certainly enrich the genre.
The lovely folk at Oxford sent me this review copy. If you want one of your own please order it via the link below and then Amazon will make a contribution to maintaining this blog.
