FernFolio

Thirteen year-old Cat Peters hates her new high school. Following her parents’ divorce, she and her mother and younger sister, Sookie, have moved to Darkmont because of her mother’s new job as office administrator at Grimoire School, an exclusive private school for girls. But mom can’t afford to send her to Grimoire, so Cat has been enrolled at Darkmont High, where things seems to have gone wrong right from the moment she arrived. Either she can’t find her class and gets demerit points for being late, or is in violation of a dress code she’s never seen, or hasn’t handed in the notes for a science lab she never attended; Cat runs into one problem after another. Harder still, though Cat was popular at her last school, she can’t even find a desk to sit at in her classes, and no one, no one has made any effort to say hello. No one, that is, other than Jasper Chung, her shy bookish neighbour who’s all right if you want to play a quiet game of Monopoly at home, but not the cool kind of friend Cat’s looking for.
One day, shortly after she starts at Darkmont High, Cat notices a flyer announcing a girls’ soccer game being organized by Grimoire School for Hallowe’en. She is excited when she discovers that each member of the winning team will be offered a full scholarship to the school, and rapidly makes up her mind to attend the team try outs and get herself chosen to play in the big game. She is thrilled when she makes the team, and even more delighted when she realizes that her team, the Witches, can easily outplay the Ghosts. Cat becomes consumed by the team practices and her dream of winning a scholarship to Grimoire, but, as Hallowe’en approaches, Jason and her younger sister, Sookie, begin to notice things about the Grimoire coaches and the school that worry them, things they try hard to share with Cat. Sookie says that her mysterious friend, Cindy, has warned that all is not what it seems at the school on the hill, and that disaster will follow if one team or the other wins the Hallowe’en game.
However, it is only when Sookie disappears, and Jason and Cat can find no record of what happened to the members of the team who won a previous Hallowe’en soccer game, that it becomes apparent they are up against forces they can only begin to imagine.
Linda DeMeulemeester’s first novel, The Secret of Grim Hill, is an interesting story, one that will appeal to readers in Grade 4 to 6.
FernFolio Editor