Sandra Yeaman

In Sumerland, M. Lee Buompensiero tells a fascinating tale that makes the case that family secrets are best uncovered and allowed to breathe. When secrets are stifled, the results are often worse for those the secret-keepers imagine they are protecting than would be the truth. This is the case for Kate Post, Sumerland‘s protagonist. The tension Buompensiero creates kept me turning pages and wishing for more when I reached the end.

After her parents die suddenly, Kate learns she has inherited a grand house from her mother, a house neither she nor her father knew anything about. The need to make decisions about the house, including whether to keep or sell it, keeps her in San Diego, away from her San Francisco home, longer than she expected. So long, in fact, that she begins to notice ghostly visions in the house that both repel and intrigue her, especially after she discovers a scribbled inscription in the sidewalk, under a bush, with initials, a date, and the misspelled name, Sumerland. Long enough also to meet Jack, whose presence further complicates her decisions.

Kate’s curiosity about both what led to her mother’s acquisition of the house that had for most of the previous 30 years had been a rehabilitation hospital for veterans and the ghostly images that interrupt her sleep lead her to discover family secrets that bring her together with family members she didn’t know she had at the same time as answering questions from her childhood that she never dared ask.

• Genre: Ghosts, Teen and Young Adult, Teens
• Print Length: 270 pages
• Publisher: Grey Castle Publishing
• Publication Date: July 27, 3016