The Girls Are Never Gone

August 30, 2021
On the heels of a recent breakup with her boyfriend, queer, implied-white teen and paranormal podcaster Dare Chase, who has type 1 diabetes, volunteers to spend July on the Arrington estate in New Hope, Va., to investigate 17-year-old Atheleen Bell’s mysterious 1992 drowning. Acting as part of the estate’s renovation team, Dare makes fast friends with Quinn Reyes, the new owner’s pretty college-age half-Boricua, half-white daughter, and Holly, 18, a white local intern interested in the house’s haunted history. By day, the teens work together to restore the crumbling house; by night, they uncover its unnerving secrets—including a series of drownings in the estate’s vast lake, beginning with that of the original owner’s daughter in 1871. But the more the trio uncovers, the more the house and the lake seem determined to claim them as its next victims. Marsh (the Reign of the Fallen series) establishes a chillingly gothic atmosphere, where house and lake are as much characters as the living and the dead. Though the comparably static adult characters have their part to play, the three clever girls at the center of this unsettling narrative steal the show. Ages 12–up.