It’s unlike Balliett to leave ends dangling, but while I struggled to get through a majority of the book, in which it seemed that nothing happened, after several rereads of the end chapters I’m still unsure of what actually happened to resolve events as they did. But her choice of a a 100-year-old ghost woman unable to impact her world or even feel much as a narrator, instead of a child protagonist led to a faded story and atmosphere, and the characters seem like they are afterthoughts. Balliett lived in Nantucket more than once, as a teenager and young adult, and it is clear that she deeply loves it and wants to share it with her readers… and for her, living in Nantucket is inextricably intertwined with ghosts. My original thought was that Balliett wanted to write about Nantucket more than she wanted to write a good ghost story for children, and a well-hidden author’s note at the back bears that out.

Balliet’s stories often involve object conservation or historic preservation, and in this case, the absent mother of Phoebe, one of the children, is away studying historic preservation while the houses on Nantucket are being subjected to “renovation.” In Out of the Wild Night, Balliett is trying something completely new– a ghost story, told by a ghost, that takes place on Nantucket, where a greedy real estate investor is buying up historic houses and gutting them to replace the original interiors with modern, updated ones, much to the consternation of some local children and, apparently, some very unhappy ghosts. Surely she couldn’t be speaking of a book by Blue Balliett? I picked this one up when a colleague told me she was unable to get more than 20 pages in. Since her first book, Chasing Vermeer, was published, a number of other children’s books that require the characters to solve puzzles and codes have come out, but hers remained an outstanding and unique voice, although her narratives have gotten more difficult to navigate, and some books have been better than others. Typically she writes what I would describe as puzzle-box mysteries– they have many complex and seemingly unrelated pieces that have to be pulled into place at the right time by their child protagonists to solve a crime that involves a literary or artistic work of some kind. Available: Hardcover, paperback, Kindle edition, audiobookīlue Balliett is a gifted writer with a lyrical voice and quirky tone to her books.

Blue balliett books