The Carrefour Curse
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
The Addams Family meets The Westing Game in this exhilarating mystery about a modern magical dynasty trapped in the ruins of their once-grand, now-crumbling ancestral home.
***Three Starred Reviews***
Twelve-year-old Garnet regrets that she doesn’t know her family. Her mother has done her best to keep it that way, living far from the rest of the magical Carrefour clan and their dark, dangerous mansion known as Crossroad House.
But when Garnet finally gets summoned to the estate, it isn’t quite what she hoped for. Her relatives are strange and quarrelsome, each room in Crossroad House is more dilapidated than the last, and she can’t keep straight which dusty hallways and cobwebbed corners are forbidden.
Then Garnet learns the family secret: their dying patriarch fights to retain his life by stealing power from others. Every accident that isn’t an accident, every unexpected illness and unexplained disappearance grants Jasper Carrefour a little more time. While the Carrefours squabbles over who will inherit his role when (if) he dies, Garnet encounters evidence of an even deeper curse. Was she brought to Crossroad House as part of the curse . . . or is she meant to break it?
Written with loads of creepy atmosphere and an edge-of-your-seat magical mystery, this thrilling story reads like The Haunting of Hill House for preteens. Perfect for late-night reading under the covers.
A Kirkus Reviews' Best Middle Grade Book of the Year
A Junior Library Guild Gold Standard Selection
An Evanston Public Library Great Book for Kids
Maine Student Book Award List Selection
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A family reclaims its magical legacy in this standout, genre-bending dark fantasy from Salerni (Eleanor, Alice, and the Roosevelt Ghosts). Twelve-year-old Garnet Carrefour's mother raised her far from the family estate, the source of their ley-line-based nature powers, but with great-grand-father Jasper dying, the family's magic compels the two back for an impending transfer of magic. Initially excited to meet her extended family, Garnet soon learns why her mother never visited Crossroad House: Jasper prowls the dilapidated home, leeching life force from his most vulnerable descendants, and an augury predicts that Garnet will repeat the fate of a girl who vanished during Jasper's last seemingly fatal illness. As "time-traveling visions" unpredictably jolt her into the missing girl's past, Garnet probes her family history, hoping to dodge the curse by solving a decades-old mystery. Salerni enlivens classic horror tropes and gothic ambience, complete with a sentient manor house, blending wry humor with atmospheric descriptions to create Garnet's compulsively readable first-person voice. The meticulously built, grounded magic system provides a fantastical buffer around realistic depictions of abuse, while supportive family relationships transcend a cycle of generational trauma. Main characters read as white. Ages 8–12.
