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| Image Graphic designed by Sandra Lopez |
But their relocation to the small town of Hawthorne, Indiana only made Matt’s life more difficult. Three bullies at his new high school dedicated themselves to making him miserable. To top it off, Matt heard that the recluse living in the dilapidated Victorian mansion next door was none other than Old Lady Hawthorne, the town’s infamous witch and murderer of wayward husbands.
Then, Old Lady Hawthorne’s niece and her three children moved in next door, and something extraordinary happened. Matt met Gerallt, the strange boy destined to become his best friend. And when Matt learned the Hawthornes’ family secret, it changed his life forever.
The Secrets of Hawthorne House is the story of an unlikely friendship, the clash of two radically different cultures, hidden magic, and a search for the lost Hawthorne treasure.
Available on Amazon
My review:
It was a
drunk driver that crashed into his mother and killed her. It was something that
15-year old Matt has never been able to get over. Now, he, along with his
father and twin sister, has moved to Hawthorne, IN, as far away from the ocean
as possible.
New house,
new town, new people.
The first
day of school, Matt meets Sarah, who tells him about Lady Hawthorne next door.
She was supposedly a witch who murdered her husband. So then why was she
running free if she was a killer?
Eventually,
Matt starts doing household chores for Lady Hawthorne and soon befriends one of
her relatives. Suddenly, life in a strange town gets even stranger.
Story goes
into a brief history of the Hawthorne Haunted House and how it came to be. It
was interesting, but lags considerably with endless monologue that seems
irrelevant. The Hawthornes certainly have incomprehensible dialogue with their
weird accent (it was Southern or Eastern or something,) making it harder to
follow and understand them.
Ultimately,
the question was: What were the secrets of Hawthorne House? Although the answer
wasn’t too clear, the bond and friendship between Matt and Gerallt was
admirable.
This strange
tale of Wiccan folklore was punctuated by childhood mayhem, dark secrets, and a
touch of magic. Of course, judging by the cover, I expected more spookiness,
like a haunting impression really, but it just sort of remained stagnant at a mild
and mediocre level. It’s a decent read for YA audiences, but I would’ve liked
it better had it been shortened and less complicated.
My rating: 3 stars
---Excerpts: The Secrets of Hawthorne House---
Clayton Cartwright
Spotting Matt as the only familiar face in the room,
Gerallt walked over and sat at the empty desk next to him. It also happened to
be the chair directly in front of Clayton Cartwright.
Waiting for the teacher to face the chalkboard and
turn his back to the class, Clayton leaned forward, stretched out his arm, and
poked a sausage-sized finger into Gerallt’s back. “Hey, new kid,” Clayton
whispered. “Where’d you get the Halloween costume? What’re you supposed to be,
some kind of Goth druggie?”
Gerallt ignored Clayton. Matt glanced sideways, the
memory of his own initial run-in with Clayton still fresh in his mind from the
first day of school.
“What’s the
matter with you?” Clayton continued, leaning forward to poke Gerallt again.
“I’m talking to you. You deaf? Or stoned!”
Gerallt glanced over his shoulder, gave Clayton a
look of utter contempt, and then turned back to read what the teacher was
writing on the chalkboard.
“Oh, I get it,” Clayton whispered, giving Gerallt a
third poke in the back. “You’re one of these Amish kids who don’t believe in
fighting. Believe in turning the other cheek, do you? Or maybe you’re just a
coward.” He gave Gerallt a shove to the back of the head. “Just wait ‘til after
school, Bible boy, and I’ll give you a little something on each cheek.”
This time it was Gerallt who made sure the teacher
was still busy at the blackboard with his back to the class. Then he turned and
whispered in the same unusual accent as his sister, “My great ahnt warned me
about you, Clayton Cartwright. It will take more than the likes of you tah
frighten me. And I promise you this. Poke me one more time in the back, and you
won’t be poking anyone for a very long time.” Then Gerallt turned his back on
Clayton, swiftly slipped his fingertips between the wooden buttons of his shirt
and began to whisper something too softly for Matt to hear.
“Is that so, Bible boy?” Clayton replied angrily,
just loudly enough for the teacher to hear. Mr. Thompson turned around just in
time to see Clayton lean his considerable weight forward to poke Gerallt once
more in the back.
Clayton’s finger had barely touched Gerallt’s back
when there was a loud crack as the front legs of Clayton’s chair snapped.
Suspended motionless for an instant, his entire body pivoted forward on the
chair’s remaining legs, and his nose smashed into the back of Gerallt’s chair
with a sickening, yet strangely satisfying, crunch. Next, his outstretched
index finger, driven by the whole weight of his body and desk, hit the floor
with such force that the resulting snap was heard clearly by everyone in the
room. This was followed instantly by the crash of Clayton's
desktop, body, and books onto the floor followed by an unexpectedly
high-pitched scream of pain. After a second of shocked silence, the class
erupted as everybody started talking and yelling at once.
Halloween
By the final week of October, the tall oaks lining
Hawthorne Drive had reached the peak of their colors, and the first yellow
leaves slowly tumbled down to lie on lawns and sidewalks. All along Hawthorne
Drive, the modest one- and two-story houses had been turned into happy
Halloween haunts. Throughout the neighborhood, bright orange lights framed
windows and doors, and small fluttering ghosts hung from the branches of many
of the smaller trees in peoples’ yards. Black plastic spiders sat on the
cottony cobwebs that shrouded every bush, while jolly Jack-O-Lanterns stood
silent guard at every porch. Front yards had become grave yards, and the
occasional inept witch hung where she’d crashed headlong into a tree or the
side of a house.
Yet the morning of Halloween had arrived with no
change to Hawthorne House, making it appear decidedly underdressed with no sign
of Halloween decorations.
“So Gerallt, doesn’t your family celebrate
Halloween?” Matt asked as the Hawthorne children joined Tina and him at the bus
stop. “You haven’t put up any decorations, and I haven’t heard you mention it
all month.”
“Of course we observe Halloween, only we call it
Samhain,” Gerallt said, exchanging cautious glances with his sister. Unlike
Wiccans, who pronounce the holiday as Sow-in,
Gerallt pronounced the Gaelic word meaning the end of summer as Sahm-wan. “It’s just that for us, the
holiday doesn’t start until dusk and we always wait until then tah decorate.”
“Tonight is very special tah us,” Gwyneth added
solemnly.
“It’s our new year,” Gerallt continued. “We have a
feast tah welcome the spirits of those who will be born in the comin’ year and
tah celebrate the lives of those who have passed in the previous year. Tonight,
we’ll celebrate the life of our fathah and welcome his spirit when he visits us
from the Spirit World…”
Before Matt could decide how to respond to Gerallt’s
unexpected expectation that his father’s ghost was going to visit him, Gareth
said, “Samhain ‘s my favorite holiday. I love trick-or-treatin’ and all the
candy. Can I go with you and Gerallt tonight? Please? I promise not tah be a
bothah or anything. Please, Matt?”
Hawthorne House
The sun had just set as Matt, now transformed into a
youthful vampire, walked out his front door to join Gerallt and Gareth for
their planned evening of house-to-house candy extortion. Rising in the east
like a pale pumpkin in the sky, a full moon peeked out from behind wispy
translucent clouds. The temperature was dropping rapidly, and Matt drew his
cheap black and scarlet cape around him with a flourish before striding out
into the gathering darkness.
A thin mist was rising from the dew-drenched grass,
forming a low layer of fog that darkened the shadows beneath the row of oaks
lining Hawthorne Drive. Matt looked next door at the old Victorian mansion and
was amazed by its transformation. Each tall window of the Hawthorne House
framed a single colorful candle, burning with flickering flames of yellow,
orange, or red. A few candles even burned with the same sickly shade of green
that illuminated the bottom of the twin streams of smoke rising from the
mansion’s massive stone chimneys. The green glowing smoke bubbling out of the
chimney pots rose only a few feet before cascading down the gabled roof to
become a low-lying fog. Matt was surprised to see a black shape suddenly swoop
through the smoke, only to be followed by another and yet another. Large bats
fluttered around the twin chimneys and the three towers, feasting on clouds of
ghostly moths seemingly drawn to the pale green smoke. Matt had seen the
occasional brown bat before, but never so many and never as big as these.
Only the short attic windows were without candles.
Yet, while watching in wonder at the fluttering forms, Matt would have sworn
that out of the edge of his vision he had seen a pale figure briefly looking
back at him from one of the darkened windows. He looked back at the window, but
the ghostly shape had vanished as quickly as it had appeared. It sent a shiver
up his spine.
Walking slowly over to the Hawthorne’s gate, Matt
admired the fantastic cobwebs that covered their fence, bushes, and even the
lower branches of the trees. Not the thick cottony store-bought stuff he’d seen
at the neighbor’s houses, they appeared to be real spider webs. Each one was
outlined in diminutive droplets of dew and hosted what looked like a large
black spider sitting smugly at its center. Matt was impressed; the webs looked
expensive, and it must have taken lots of work to drape them so realistically.
The gate creaked mournfully as Matt opened it.
Thirteen of the most intricately carved jack-o-lanterns he’d ever seen lined
the front walk. Each had a different expression, some friendly and some almost
terrifying, and every one worthy of wonder and envy. They were so incredible
that Matt thought Gwyneth, her mom, and
great aunt must surely have worked all day on them.
The fog was getting thicker. Gazing into the darkness
on either side of the twin rows of carved pumpkins, he could just make out
fairy rings of large, white toadstools around teepees of dried corn stalks and several
giant pumpkins at least a yard across. To his right, what looked like a real
skeleton hung suspended by a hangman’s noose from a lower branch of the huge
oak in the corner of their front yard. To his left, another pair of realistic
skeletons sat hand in hand in the small gazebo next to the fence between their
houses. Clearly, Matt thought, the Hawthornes went all out on Halloween.
The covered porch was lined with more of the marvelous
jack-o-lanterns. Cobwebs hung from the newly painted gingerbread trim and
between the ornately turned spindles of the recently repaired railing. Leaning
over to take a closer look at one of the webs, Matt jerked back in shocked
surprise. Both the big black spider and its web were real! Turning in
amazement, he went to the windows for a better look at the colored candles;
they too were real with flickering flames burning yellow, orange, red, or
green.
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