From School Library Journal
Grade 8 Up. Fourteen-year-old Anna's parents have quit big city life to run a bed and breakfast in rural Vermont, which makes little difference to Anna since she didn't really like her old school or have any friends there. While soaking in the tub one day, she looks up to see someone watching her. Roxy is the ghost of a 14-year-old hotel maid who died in the 1800s. Later readers learn that she died of a botched abortion after being made pregnant by a traveling portrait painter. The two girls become good friends, and Anna learns that Roxy cannot pass on to "forever" until something big happens. Through an increasingly unbelievable chain of events that big thing turns out to be saving Anna from a kiddie pornographer, who is a guest in the inn and has managed to get Anna to model for him without her parents' knowledge, by pushing him to his death at a local gorge. The plot is painfully contrived and the attempt to draw parallels between Roxy (whom no one has ever been able to see before) and Anna is too blatant. And while Thompson does throw in "issues"?abortion, drugs, porn, parent/child relationships, teen dating, and, for good measure, aliens?they are piled on way too heavily and never dealt with; instead, they're only used to move the soap-opera plot to its abrupt ending. Try some of Lois Duncan's books like Summer of Fear (1976) or Stranger with My Face (1981, both Little, Brown) for far superior, believable, and enjoyable examples of this genre.?Carrie Schadle, New York Public Library
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Kirkus Reviews
Thompson (The Trials of Molly Sheldon, 1995, etc.) shoehorns a novel-sized cast into a short story's worth of plot in this wry tale of a teenager, a pornographer, and a ghost. Anna isn't unhappy that her parents have chosen to move away from a New York suburb to be innkeepers in a small Vermont town, but she is lonely--until the ghost of Roxy Cray, a serving girl who died of a botched abortion in 1818, appears. Their relationship is an unusual one from the beginning; Roxy, who can be solid or invisible at will, helps Anna with housekeeping chores while Anna, after giving her new friend clothes and a makeover, calmly decides that it doesn't matter whether she's imaginary or not. It starts to matter only when Tony, a photographer, after glibly convincing Anna to take off her clothes for some shots, is pushed from a cliff. A witness says that Anna did it. All Anna remembers is hearing him shout as she hid behind a rock. Was it Roxy, or is Anna editing her memory? Thompson adopts a casual, chatty tone that robs the uglier revelations of much of their shock value, and Anna seems far too gullible, but the ghost, a bevy of unconventional guests, and a budding romance in a subplot will keep readers awake. Light fare, with some cautionary undercurrents. (Fiction. 10-13) --
Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
