Since the death of her older brother John, Sarah Wagner has totally lost interest in life. She enters senior year bored with school politics, dating, and her usual girlfriends. Only her friend Donna, a self-proclaimed misfit, manages to maintain a connection. What’s worse, Sarah begins to imagine that John is haunting her, appearing at her bedside and in the bathroom mirror. Her mother seems oblivious at first, but is soon caught up in Sarah’s belief. As Sarah becomes obsessed with the idea that John is stalking her from beyond the grave, she tries to find level ground in a relationship with a new boy at school. But as frightened as Sarah is, she’s equally terrified that she’s just imagining it all. What’s really going on? A macabre twist in the final pages offers answers as unsettling as Sarah’s terrifying dilemma.

Natale Ghent’s new novel is a startlingly different book from her first, No Small Thing, which was clearly aimed at preteens. Here she has created a much more complex narrative that twists and turns, often leaving the reader totally confused. Her rationale seems to be that readers will realize that Sarah is an unreliable narrator, but Ghent doesn’t provide a strong alternative narrative thread to guide us to the “true” story. In the final pages of the novel, Ghent completely shifts the narrative perspective and, without giving away the ending, leaves us almost as haunted, if that’s possible, as Sarah.

The Book of Living and Dying is often so subtle that teen readers likely won’t pick up the carefully placed clues, and the Victorian-style ghost story ending, with its chattering birds and bright forget-me-nots in an empty graveyard, is a little too maudlin. Dressing up a classic ghost story in the clothes of a realistic problem novel is an innovative idea, but it doesn’t quite work here.