This reads like a Halloween Lifetime movie.

72. The Chanting – Beverly T. Haaf

At first, I wasn’t sure what I was reading because the cover says “horror” with trees and that means potentially Druids (whee!), but the story says romance after tragedy like an autumn-set Lifetime movie. Although I did see The Guardian, where there is a bit of horror and trees and Druids on Lifetime the first time I saw it on TV and I believe it was October, the best month in cable television. Anyway, there are ghosts and a teensy bit of “You’re going mad, Janet,” but without her ex-husband, Janet has enough of a support network to not be shipped off to a hospital and locked up for experiencing psychic phenomena revolving around deceased children now that she has also lost a child and an apparently dickish to no end ex-husband.

Janet moves in with her sister and at her debut party at the Stocktons, the Virginia Stocktons that is, even though they’re in Princeton, meets a guy who sells solar energy equipment and a local historian and the Stocktons’ mute adopted daughter, Gina, oh, and her cat, who is a Siamese because they sound like crying babies and that can be used to explain Janet’s hearing phantom crying babies.

There are also some neighbors in a house Janet originally wanted to buy with her ex who are more interesting than the Virginia Stocktons and Gina thinks so too. An older woman, Rose, who has a hard time communicating and likes cats and wandering a bit is taken care of by her younger sister, who is married to a very scary looking former Austrian child psychologist who came to Princeton from Argentina. So, he’s clearly a former Nazi, said my brain, because who else does that route? I mean, it’s possible he’s not, but in books that route is usually a red flag for Nazis. Well, I know it’s a spoiler, but I was right. He was a Nazi, although he thought his experiments on children were not political… Okey dokey.

Janet for some reason is not aware of the “Nazi war criminals moving to South America thing” and she thinks the original person to own the house who used it as an orphanage must have been a madwoman who abused children because of all the very sad ghostly apparitions she keeps seeing. Way to blame women and be wrong, Janet. At least she wants to take Gina trick or treating.

 

Does Peregrine blame Ozma for getting them into this pumpkin photoshoot? Yes, she does. Pere also thinks Ozma is a madladypig, even though Pere’s sitting atop the pumpkin like it’s her throne.