Review: Graciela in the Abyss

By Meg Medina

Somerville, MA, 2025. Fiction. 236 pages.

Graciela is a 13-year-old girl who falls off a cliff into the ocean and drowns. She wakes up a century later as a sea ghost. Life as a sea ghost is a little slower, and she likes to spend time making sea glass and assisting other spirits as they help sea ghosts like herself wake up. One day Graciela meets a mortal boy named Jorge who threw a cursed harpoon into the sea. When the cursed weapon injures Graciela's best friend, she is determined to find out how to destroy the weapon before her friend dies from her wound. In her quest to find answers, Graciela must form an alliance with Jorge in order to learn about the harpoon's legend, and destroy it. But time is running out, and they must hurry and destroy the harpoon before an evil sea ghosts uses it to cause chaos on the living and the dead.

This is an eerie underwater fantasy story that has an ancient fable-like feel full of sea creatures, sunken secrets, and hard truths. The world building is breathtaking, and the story itself is full of compassion and suspense that keeps you turning pages. If you enjoy reading high stakes adventure stories with a little bit of ghostly suspense, this is the story for you.

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