This leads up to a vicious climactic fight that sees Good and Evil repeatedly switching sides.

Growing into their true natures amid revelations and marked physical changes, the two spark escalating rivalry between the wings of the school. Gradually-too gradually, as the author strings out hundreds of pages of Hogwarts-style pranks, classroom mishaps and competitions both academic and romantic-it becomes clear that the placement wasn’t a mistake at all. When it happens to sweet, Disney princess–like Sophie and her friend Agatha, plain of features, sour of disposition and low of self-esteem, they are both horrified to discover that they’ve been dropped not where they expect but at Evil and at Good respectively. Those who survive to graduate become major or minor characters in fairy tales. Hahn breaks the spell of girlhood frivolity to reveal a dark cycle of pain, fear, and casual cruelty with supernatural consequences.Ĭhainani works an elaborate sea change akin to Gregory Maguire’s Wicked (1995), though he leaves the waters muddied.Įvery four years, two children, one regarded as particularly nice and the other particularly nasty, are snatched from the village of Gavaldon by the shadowy School Master to attend the divided titular school. For those looking to delight in the mirth of the macabre, look elsewhere. Compelled to say and do terrible things as part of Elsie’s vengeful plan, Annie is sent away due to a “precarious state of mind,” and if Elsie has her way, Annie will never return. When Elsie dies without warning in the 1918 outbreak of Spanish influenza, Annie is shaken by shock, guilt, and, eventually, fear when, after a sledding accident and concussion, Elsie’s ghost appears to reclaim Annie’s friendship and enact revenge.

After a short while of dealing with Elsie’s unpredictable moods, jealousy, and aggressive manipulation, Annie agrees with them and falls into the ranks of the more popular girls as they ruthlessly tease Elsie. Uncomfortably thrust into the limelight as the new girl at the Pearce Academy for Girls in the fall of 1918, white, 12-year-old Annie Browne is nervous about making friends when she is approached by Elsie Schneider (also white), the schoolroom pariah who is shunned by the other girls as an obnoxious (and German) liar and tattletale. Hahn’s latest middle-grade ghost story brings the supernatural to the 1918 Spanish influenza pandemic with all the disturbing force readers have come to love and dread.

One for Sorrow by Mary Downing Hahn