Ghost House

Overview

Chloe Kennedy has spent years trying to outrun the ghosts that followed her through childhood, but her mother's death drags that old sensitivity back to the surface. Sent to stay at her grandmother's sprawling country estate in England, she hopes for quiet and distance from her grief. Instead, she finds a house and grounds steeped in a much older sorrow.

Among the estate's lingering presences is Alexander Reade, who died more than a century and a half ago but remains startlingly, almost physically present to Chloe. Their connection deepens quickly, pulling her toward him in a way none of her previous encounters with the dead ever have.

That bond does not go unnoticed. Isobel, the woman Alexander loved and lost in life, reawakens as a jealous, destructive force determined to eliminate anyone who might come between them again. To protect Alexander and herself, Chloe has to stretch her still-unfamiliar abilities further than she ever intended, risking both the relationship she has found and her own place among the living.

Behind the Story

Ghost House arrived as Alexandra Adornetto's follow-up to her Halo trilogy, carrying forward the same appetite for star-crossed pairings between an ordinary teenage girl and a supernatural figure bound by rules beyond her control. Where Halo drew on angelic mythology, this series turns to the more traditional haunted-house gothic: a decaying English estate, a lake with buried secrets, and a spirit whose unfinished business refuses to stay in the past.

The setup also leans into a well-worn convention of YA paranormal romance — the living heroine drawn to a love interest defined by death rather than life — while grounding it in Chloe's very real, very human grief over losing her mother. That pairing of mourning with a story about literally speaking to the dead gives the book a psychological hook that goes beyond its genre trappings: the ghosts Chloe sees are not just plot devices but stand-ins for the losses she has not processed. The introduction of Isobel as a rival for Alexander's attention adds a more conventional romantic-triangle tension to what might otherwise be a straightforward ghost story.

Why Ghost House Has Been Challenged

A parent raising concerns about this title has typically pointed to its central premise: a teenage girl forming a romantic attachment to a dead man, and a plot that treats communication with spirits and encounters with the supernatural as normal, even desirable, parts of adolescent life. The complaint is less about any single scene than about the book's overall framing of ghosts, possession, and the afterlife as material for a romance aimed at young readers.

Beyond the supernatural romance itself, objections have centered on the book's darker undercurrents — a vengeful spirit willing to harm or destroy anyone in her way, and a heroine who must risk her own safety and identity to counter that threat. Reviewers raising concerns have described this combination of occult themes and menace as inappropriate for the book's stated 13-and-up audience. In this catalog, Ghost House has been the subject of a challenge in 1 state and 1 school district.