Picture The Dead

Title: Picture the Dead
Author: Adele Griffin
Illustrator: Lisa Brown
Pub: Sourcebook Fire, 2010
Pages: 262
Genre: Historical, Ghost, Spooky, Mystery, Paranormal

And it's about?
 
Jennie is orphaned and living with her Aunt and Uncle.  Her fiance and his brother are off to war and times are pretty wretched.  Eventually there's a return, but it's only one of the brothers.  Not Jennie's fiance.  Instead, she is told that Will was killed honorably in battle.

Quinn (Will's brother) has become quite sullen, which is expected considering all that he had probably seen and all that he had lost.  His injuries leave him in bed for the first few weeks and Jennie nurses him back to health all the while trying to find out more details about Will's death.

Because there is a secret there.  Jennie believes that Will is still around.  His spirit at least.  Things in the dark house move and symbolic artifacts of their love randomly show up.  Quinn wants Jennie to move on and marry him, but it doesn't look like Will wants that at all.

And my thoughts?

Ooookay.  I have to admit when I picked this book up it was just because I was at the Walmart skimming through the selection and the pictures were so cool (they're done in a scrapbook sorta way) that I had to impulsively buy it.  That and I had a vague recollection that Adele Griffin was a pretty cool middle grades author and although I read A LOT of young adult fiction, I sorta lack in the middle grades.

Then, I grabbed it recently for DEAR and got suckered in.  This book was not what I was expecting.  *shakes head* Nope. It was SO much more.

It's hard to surprise me but this book did.  And no, I don't mean in the "hey it really is a good read" but moreso in the "I'm a smart cookie and can usually figure things out but this one? Yeah, totally left field."

Fabulous middle grade mystery.  With love.  And sadness.  And pictures.  Oh my.  I can't wait to reread this book.