ALA Booklist (Wed Sep 01 00:00:00 CDT 1999)

Even though 12-year-old Ted and his family live in an ordinary house in Rochester, New York, with no swamps, cemeteries or windswept moors, his 5-year-old sister is being shadowed by the ghosts of an African American mother and child. Ted, who is more concerned about finishing his class project on Luxembourg than he is about his sister's new imaginary friends, is, nevertheless, drawn into the hauntings by eerie dreams and his sister's obvious fright. When he learns that his 13-year-old cousin saw the ghosts when she was 5, he investigates. The discovery of his great-great-grandmother's diary and the story of her involvement with the Underground Railroad is the key to unearthing the ghosts' sad tale. The journal entries offer a firsthand glimpse into the risks runaway slaves and those who sheltered them faced, and without resorting to gimmicks, Vande Velde manages to tie up loose ends and give her readers a satisfying, genuinely spooky story. (Reviewed September 1, 1999)

Horn Book (Sat Apr 01 00:00:00 CST 2000)

Ted's little sister announces that she is being visited by two mysterious figures that no one else in the family can see. After reading an ancestor's diary, Ted determines these visitors are the ghosts of runaway slaves who were harbored in their house and later died tragically. The novel is well written though uneven in tone, with Ted's lighthearted, contemporary narrative at odds with the sobering slave story.

Kirkus Reviews

Vande Velde (Never Trust a Dead Man, p. 458, etc.) combines a ghost story with slave history for a comic middle-grade novel. Fifth-grader Ted has an obnoxious teenage brother, Zach, and a cute five-year-old sister, Vicki, who seems to attract ghosts. Her announcement that she has a new invisible friend, Marella, is followed by another pronouncement, that Vicki is afraid of a "bad lady" who is also invisible, but who comes through the walls. Ted has a series of vivid nightmares about corpses trying to drown him; when his school project on Luxembourg is wrecked by apparently unseen hands, he's convinced the house is haunted and begins digging for clues. Ted learns his house once sheltered runaway slaves, and identifies the ghosts as mother and child fugitives who drowned in an old section of the canal behind the house. A description of the real-life mother in an old diary indicates that she was a good person—has she turned nasty in the afterlife? In a surprising twist, it is Marella who must fulfill her sinister purpose and possess Vicki. Ted, a witty narrator on the subject of the typical sibling behavior that is spiked into the plot, must submit to possession himself, in a fast-paced story that mixes scares and history for some can't-put-it-down fun. (Fiction. 8-12)

School Library Journal

Gr 4-7-Vande Velde continues her string of historical ghost stories, this time focusing on the Underground Railroad. The first-person narrator, 11-year-old Ted, is certain that his house in Rochester, NY, can't be haunted because it has been in his family for generations and there have been no secrets to speak of in its past. Then his five-year-old sister Vicki's imaginary friend Marella and the "bad lady" who seems to be chasing her prove themselves to be all too real. Ted decides to get to the bottom of the mystery and finds a journal belonging to one of his ancestors. It recounts the tragic story of two runaway slaves, a mother and her five-year-old daughter, who drowned in the Erie Canal, which used to run through the family's backyard. The story culminates in Ted and Vicki being possessed by the spirits in order to help them move on. The secondary characters include busy parents barely present; a typical teenage brother; and a trendy, smart-talking cousin. However, the plot has original twists and the journal passages are nicely integrated into a story with some genuine chills. The penultimate chapter unnecessarily switches to present tense when Adah, the mother's spirit, possesses Ted. Nonetheless, there is sufficient humor, action, and scariness to keep readers engaged. A good choice for fans of Bruce Coville's "Nina Tanleven" series (Bantam).-Timothy Capehart, Leominster Public Library, MA Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.