Skip to main content

Review: Graciela in the Abyss

By
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. 



Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Stand Tall by Joan Bauer

By DeeDee
Stand Tall By Siena Siegel by Joan Bauer Putnam, 2002, 182 pgs Realistic Fiction Tree is 12 years old and over 6 feet tall. That would be great if he were a basketball player, but he is not. Dealing with his unusual size is not Tree's only challenge. Tree's parents have recently gone through a divorce, and his grandfather has had his leg amputated as the result of an old Vietnam War injury. The strength of this book is the characterizations. All of the main characters are dimensional and sympathetic. Bauer sets the characters in real and often funny family situations. Best of all is the character of Tree. He is boy with a heart to match his stature. This is a great book for boys or girls ages 9-12, as a read aloud or for individual reading. This book could also be a good Rx book for children whose families are going through divorce, or for anyone who feels like they don't fit in.
Post a Comment
Read more

Review: The New Girl

By
The New Girl By Cassandra Calin New York: Graphix, 2024. Comic. 261 pages. 12-year-old Lia and her family have just moved from Romania to Montreal, and she's doing her best to keep up with the changes. But, she's homesick. She misses the rest of her family, her friends, and her favorite Romanian treats. She doesn't speak French and her English is shaky, which makes it hard to make friends, even in her international immersion class. And she's dealing with super painful menstrual cramps every month. But before long, Lia starts to hit her stride. She befriends the other bilingual girls in her class, she gets a spot as the artist for her school's magazine, and even has a new crush -- Julien. Though she may be the new girl, Lia is starting to fit in. This slice of life graphic novel is an adorable choice for middle grade readers and young teens. Lia is a likable protagonist and readers will have little difficulty relating to her adjustment to school. The text speaks to a...
Post a Comment
Read more

Review: Cincinnati Lee, Curse Breaker

By
  Cincinnati Lee, Curse Breaker By Heidi Heilig New York: Greenwillow Books, 2025. Fiction. 291 pages. Thanks to Cincinnati Lee's no good, dirty rotten, artifact stealing great great great grandfather, Cincinnati's family is now cursed and Cincinnati feels like it's up to her to break the curse. Which involves trying to steal the artifacts back from museums that her grandfather robbed from graves and archeological sites around the world and return them to their countries of origin. But when Cincinnati's first artifact stealing mission goes awry, she decides it might be more effective to steal an all-powerful artifact herself that she can use to break the curse - The Spear of Destiny. Unfortunately her race for the spear will pit her against art smugglers and thieves intent on finding the ancient artifact themselves. If you are looking for an Indiana Jones read-alike, this is the perfect for you! Heavy on the adventure with similar levels of mysticism to those seen in th...
Post a Comment
Read more