School Library Journal Review
Gr 7 Up-Twins Pat and Dom move with their family to the seaside cottage where they and their large extended family have summered for years after their nan, who is in the early stages of dementia, burns down their home. It's a grim and desolate place in the winter, made more so by the friction between their parents. When a ghost possesses Dom, Pat is afraid but determined to save his brother at all costs. It's a frightening prospect, made harder by having no help, save occasional flickers of reality from Nan. Pat has to cover for his possessed brother while his parents resolve their own issues. It's a long and very scary process that has him questioning his own sanity and wondering whether he has what he needs to pull Dom back alive. This is an involved and atmospheric story, made even more scary by Gerard Doyle's narration. He does a great job of ramping up the tension at the right times. The plot is complex, but those who hang in will be well rewarded.-John R. Clark, Hartland Public Library, ME (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Horn Book Review
When their home burns down, twin teens Patrick and Dominick move with their family to the shabby seaside cottage where they usually spend summer holidays. Almost at once, Pat sees that Dom is being haunted by the ghost of a young boy, while Pat himself is visited by nightmares of a soldier drowning in the muddy trenches of World War I. Eventually Dom is utterly possessed by Francis, the ghost of a boy who died of diphtheria decades ago, and Pat is desperate to do what he can to retrieve his brother. Family and local history come together as the twisting plot makes its way toward resolution: another pair of twin brothers, a senile grandmother, Irish lads turned British soldiers, and a series of surreal dreams and psychic landscapes all fall into place. Sometimes Kiernan's storytelling is fraught and overdrawn; at its best it is confident, pungent, and poetic. Family love, loyalty, and protectiveness are palpable in a well-drawn cast of characters, and the pace is frequently galvanized with energetic drama and dialogue pierced with Irish dialect. deirdre f. baker (c) Copyright 2014. The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Kirkus Review
Irish fantasist Kiernan (The Poison Throne, 2010, etc.) explores the dynamics of love and loss.In 1974, 15-year-old identical twins Pat and Dom move with their family into a drab summer cottage after their senile grandmother inadvertently burns down their house. Nerves still raw from the disruption of their lives and the loss of their home, the twins start to have strange dreams. Then Pat hears Dom talking in the night and sees a goblin-boy peering down from the bunk above him. The harrowing series of events that follows convinces Pat that he's losing his brother: Dom becomes possessed by a 10-year-old boy stuck in a gray fog that's neither this world nor the next, endlessly searching for his twin, a soldier who died in the trenches of World War I. Pat's narration is marked by vivid descriptions and consistently polished, well-paced prose: "Yesterday morning, I'd had a brother. I'd had a best friend. He'd been fun. He'd been interesting: my slow-burn, articulate counterweight. Now I was lopsided, a boat with one paddle, rowing frantically and spinning in a slow, maddening circle around the space that should have been him." The otherworldly goings-on are grounded in the family lives of the village their Nan grew up in, adding intriguing nuances to the psychological drama.A gripping, highly original ghost story. (Fantasy. 12 up) Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
When 15-year-old twins Dominick and Patrick lose their home to a fire, their family moves to the seaside cottage where they usually spend their summers. Everything seems run of the mill, until the twins start having vivid dreams about a bad man coming to take them, and when they wake they're filled with a ravenous, mindless hunger. Soon the dreams start bleeding into reality, and Pat sees an ominous WWI soldier lurking in the shadows. Then he wakes to a terrifying goblinlike creature talking to his brother in the night. When Dom becomes possessed by a ghost and his body turns dangerously ice-cold, no one in their loving family save Pat seems to notice, so he takes it upon himself to dig up clues about the ghost in the hopes that he can rescue his twin. Dom and Pat share a deeply loving bond, which makes Pat's panic over Dom's transformation palpable. In stark, eerie passages, Kiernan tells a gripping story as much about the love between brothers as it is about ghosts.--Hunter, Sarah Copyright 2014 Booklist
