In It Happened to Anna, a suspenseful yet sweet tale about friendship, a middle schooler is haunted by the ghost who killed her best friend.
Sadie's ghost has been with her "for as long as she [can] remember." It killed her sixth-grade best friend Anna, so Sadie refuses to make friends in middle school. But the ghost, who plunges rooms into darkness when Sadie is nice to Charlotte, surprisingly does nothing to intervene when Sadie meets "pale and angular" Mal. The lack of ghostly intervention plus this girl's "too-cool, irreverent" weirdness tempts Sadie toward building a friendship. Pleasing Mal, however, requires that she entertain Mal's constant disdain for others, especially Charlotte, as well as prank classmates in increasingly harsh ways. Sadie, sick of "push[ing] away everyone who might have loved her," doesn't like who she's becoming, but is even more terrified of losing the one friend safe from the ghost.
Tehlor Kay Mejia (Paola Santiago series) has penned a story about what makes a good friend that is both haunting and heartfelt. It shows the pressure to forge friendships by forthrightly displaying Sadie's desperation to stay in an unhealthy relationship maintained through manipulation ("I thought we were best friends") when she could instead reciprocate Charlotte's kind support. Sadie is often influenced by her loneliness and grief ("If she could have gone back and done something, anything, not to lose Anna, wouldn't she?"). Fear of abandonment, panic attacks, and dread are gracefully represented, along with Mejia's clever supernatural slant. --Samantha Zaboski, freelance editor and reviewer