The Ghosts of Ashbury High

Moriarty, Jaclyn.   The Ghosts of Ashbury High.   New York:  Levine/Scholastic, 2010.  444p.

Audience:   High School, 14+

Genre:   Horror Fiction

Topics of Focus:   Adolescence, Romance, School Personalities, Ghosts, Gothic Fiction

While Moriarity is popular for her earlier published works set at Ashbury High, this one really misses the boat.   It tries to be too much all at once.   The author presents her narrative through a combination of standard shifting character voices and artifacts consisting of letters, meeting notes, test questions, emails, blog posts, and school assignment handouts.   Like the characters floating through adolescence, the reader is sent flying through the text without firm grounding, benchmarks, or a map.   The only true consistency is the familiar setting of the author and parody of the gothic novel form.    While I must admit that I gave up on the quirkiness of the text well before its conclusion, the annoyance of the book’s fragmented form was too great to stick with it.   The story held no redeeming sociopolitical subtext to make it worth my time.   If you want an artifact-driven, shifting-narration, gothic novel, read Bram Stoker’s Dracula.   I would only use this book as a doorstop in my classroom.

Annotation by Denise Aulik