The girl in the locked room

The Girl in the Locked Room is a ghost story by the American writer Mary Downing Hahn, published in 2015. It is told in two voices: that of the living girl in the present and that of the girl who lived in the house a hundred years before.

Jules has come to the house with her family because her father's work restoring old buildings has brought them there, and the place is empty enough and strange enough for a child to want company in it. The other voice in the novel belongs to a girl who lived in the same rooms a century earlier and who cannot leave. What begins as an exchange between two children who cannot see each other turns into the story of what happened in the house, and the two narrations fit together as the present-day girl learns more about the earlier one.

Hahn has written ghost stories for young readers for decades, and the structure here lets the reader know more than either narrator does while both of them work towards what happened.