City of Ghosts

Adults often assume children cannot handle spooky stories or books about monsters and ghosts. However, children are the ideal audience for the subject matter, as their unfettered imaginations are the perfect place for these fantastical stories to proliferate. Author Victoria Schwab steeps the novel in plenty of ghostly thrills but also injects it with a dose of humor, allowing her readers to release their gasps of horror through a chuckle. Ghosts in the novel reflect the adventurous spirit of children and their desire to explore what lies in the in-between and what is not easily quantifiable or explainable.

Cassidy’s compulsion to respond to the tapping mimics every child’s fascination with what lies under their bed or in their closet and the indisputably sublime feeling of both terror and excitement flowing through the body at the same time. Cassidy also uses her trips through the Veil to overturn the misconceptions about the spirit world, saying, “In the movies, poltergeists can lift televisions and slide beds across the floor. But the truth is, it takes a lot of spirit power for a ghost to reach across the Veil—the curtain between their world and ours” (4).

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