All The Lovely Bad Ones

All The Lovely Bad Ones is a 2008 middle-grade fiction book written by Mary Downing Hahn, a prolific children’s author who has authored several award-winning novels. The book’s title is taken from the poem “Little Orphant Annie” by James Whitcomb Riley, which the author inscribed to all children—including “all the lovely bad ones.” All The Lovely Bad Ones won an Oklahoma Sequoyah Award for Children and the Rebecca Caudill Young Readers’ Book Award.

All The Lovely Bad Ones follows two mischievous siblings who stay at their grandmother’s inn for the summer. Travis and Corey begin playing ghostly pranks on the guests, and while doing so, they accidentally awaken the sleeping ghosts of Fox Hill Inn.

Plot Summary

The novel’s main protagonist is Travis, a school-aged boy of about thirteen years old. Both he and his younger sister, Corey, must spend their summer in Vermont with Grandmother because of their expulsion from summer camp. Travis and Corey are pranksters; last summer, they started food fights, skipped the nightly campfires, deflated a counselor’s bike, and purposely tipped over a canoe. These pranks resulted in their banishment from the camp.

The idea of spending their summer in the middle of nowhere initially bores the pair.