Breathe: A Ghost Story

About the Book

Jack is not a normal boy. He can talk to ghosts. In his new home, an aging farmhouse, he meets the Ghost Mother, a grief-stricken spirit who becomes very attached to him...too attached. He learns that the Ghost Mother is preying in the cruelest imaginable way on four child ghosts who are trapped in the house, stealing their energy to sustain her own. Before Jack can figure out how to help them, the Ghost Mother takes possession of his real mother's body. Jack wants to fight back, but he has severe asthma and risks fatal attacks with any physical exertion. It will take all his resources, and his mother's as well, to fight off the Ghost Mother and save the ghost children from a horrible fate.

About the Author :
Written when he was almost forty, Cliff McNish's Doomspell Trilogy won him an instant and avid readership and has been published in 19 languages around the world. Since then, he has continued to write fiction, including The Silver Sequence, Breathe, and Angel, and has been hailed as a great new voice in writing for children (The Bookseller). Mr. McNish was born in northeastern England. He enjoys playing golf, walking up mountains, and eating as much hot and spicy food as possible. He is married and has a teenage daughter, whose demand for a scary story led to the idea for his first book.

Review :
"Haunting imagery and fully realized supernatural mythology charge this eerie ghost story." --The Horn Book Guide "This is a well-crafted story that is weightier than the standard chiller. Filled with suspense, it will keep readers riveted to the pages." --School Library Journal "Twelve-year-old Jack and his mother move into an old farmhouse in the English countryside. Jack loves old things because he has a unique gift: 'The way people who had once lived in houses conveyed themselves to Jack through tiny, fleeting trace memories in furniture.' His mother hopes that by surrounding Jack with unfamiliar things that he can touch and communicate with will distract him from missing his recently deceased father. Initially Jack loves the old house, even when he discovers that the woman who lived there before them died in the very bed in which he sleeps. But then he begins to sense the presence of spirits and not just memories. The house has been haunted for more than a hundred years by the Ghost Mother, who has forced four children's spirits to join her. Because the ghost children fear and hate her, the Ghost Mother has decided that she wants a living child to love her and she is not taking no for an answer, even if it means forcing Jack's real mother out of the picture. McNish's vivid descriptions of the ghosts and Jack's interaction with them is so real that just the thought of the icy coldness of the malevolent Ghost Mother's touch will make the reader shudder. Oliver, the strongest willed of the ghost children, develops a coded message to help Jack, but what these children's spirits and Jack endure may well cause the reader to leave the light on at night. Even the most reluctant reader will not be able to put this one down."
--VOYA