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. Another solid addition to Hahn’s oeuvre, this would also make a spine-chilling pair with Cohen’s The Doll’s Eye (BCCB 2/17).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. Elsie makes an intriguingly venomous spirit, and she’s particularly good at getting both Annie and the reader to question Annie’s perception of reality.
Though Elsie’s situation is pretty awful, she is wicked in life and death meanwhile, Annie is blind to her own privilege, believing that her remorse should earn her forgiveness. Hahn (author of the classic Wait Till Helen Comes) situates her ghost story within the context of an already frightening world: World War I and the flu loom over the girls’ daily lives, with funeral processions becoming daily events then there’s the smaller but still caustic acts of hate in the girls’ ridicule of Elsie, their poorer classmate.
Elsie, however, is going to make sure that Annie feels more than simple regret, tormenting her from beyond the grave to the point where her parents fear for her sanity and place her in to a convalescent home.
The Spanish flu is raging through the country, though, and when Elsie succumbs to it, Annie and her cohort feel terrible-mostly-about how they treated her. Starting at the Pearce Academy for Girls in 1918, sixth-grader Annie manages to wriggle out from under the attentions of Elsie, a clingy, mean-spirited, and much detested girl, and into the favored crowd, where she happily joins the others in bullying Elsie.
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