Twelve-year-old Liza Carroll helps her adoptive uncle, Mr. Spencer ("a liar and a fraud"), create fake photographic images of deceased loved ones using cotton, newsprint, and a double exposure of the film. The pair, along with Liza's sickly younger brother, John, arrive at the Silver Star Society, a Spiritualist community in rural Pennsylvania, in the fall of 1920 to con its true believers. There Liza begins seeing "shadows" of the departed who become increasingly menacing as they broach the thin veil between the worlds of the living and the dead, seeking to claim John. Perry deftly teeters between suspenseful and scary with an immersive story set during a relatively unexplored era in middle-grade fiction. Although Liza admonishes readers early, "Don't believe a thing I say," the photography scam frames careful revelations about the lies Liza tells herself and others. A helpful note introduces spiritualism, and striking photographic images appear throughout. This gripping paranormal story should be an easy sell for R. J. Palacio's Pony (2021) and future fans of the Miss Peregrine series.

A young girl in 1920 upstate New York becomes an expert on helping convince people they can see the dead.After 12-year-old Liza's parents died in the influenza pandemic, she and her younger brother, John, are left in the custody of itinerant-photographer–turned–con man Mr. Spencer. Now they work together on a spiritualist scam, double-exposing photographic plates to make it seem as if the dead are among the living. When they arrive at the Silver Star Society, a spiritualistic center in rural Pennsylvania run by a woman named Ms. Eldridge, their luck seems to spin in both directions at once: They're welcomed and believed, but at the same time, mysterious storms wreak havoc on the center, and Liza begins to see nighttime shadows she's convinced are threatening John. Liza, as narrator, warns us upfront not to believe a single thing she says, yet she seems so utterly grounded and convincing that the story she tells slides from historical fiction into supernatural suspense before readers realize it. The novel is well paced and well plotted, but the ending, especially the epilogue, lacks emotional punch. Black-and-white photographs that, like the story, aren't quite what they seem appear throughout. Most characters seem to be White.Ghost-story fans will stay up reading past their bedtimes. (photo credits) (Historical paranormal. 8-12)