★★★★☆ I love these weird kids!

Death at Morning House

Maureen Johnson

Death at Morning House is not a Truly Devious book, but it will feel familiar to anyone who has read those books. Like the Truly Devious books, Death at Morning House places a group of teenage kids at an isolated location where, in the distant past, a bunch of people died under suspicious circumstances. The isolated location is Ralston Island in the St Lawrence River. Morning House is a historic house on the Island that has been uninhabited since the 1932 deaths. Some of the chapters (13, if I counted right) take place on Ralston Island in 1932. and record events on the island around the time of the deaths.

Recently, someone has purchased the old place and opened it up to visitors for the summer. A group of teenagers, including our first-person narrator Marlowe Wexler, have been hired to show the place to visitors. 28 chapters tell of the events that happen to them.

The book is about two mysteries -- that of the deaths in 1932, and also of the events among those living on the island this summer. The 1932 mystery is not really a mystery to us, the readers, since the chapters set in 1932 tell us what happened, including whodunnit. The contemporary mystery is more of a conventional mystery -- one that it falls to our hero Marlowe to figure out, and whose solution we don't learn until near the end.

The one thing I really loved about this book is the thing I love about the Truly Devious books. They are full of realistically weird, socially awkward kids. In Truly Devious the most important of these is Stevie, who in Nine Liars describes her travel wardrobe thus

She was the kind of person who had both kinds of shirts: the T-shirts with writing on them and those without. There were the jeans she liked, the ones that fit okay, and the ones that fit badly but she’d bought them and was therefore stuck with them for the rest of her life, or whatever it was that happened to jeans. She’d brought the one dress she owned, which was black and still had the tags on it.

In Death at Morning House we have conversations like this

“Some people would take that as a compliment,” Van said. “If a guy burned a house down for me, I’d probably marry him. This is my problem.”
“You really would,” Liani said. “And it really is.”

Or this

“I thought she seemed fine,” April said as she bounced gently off the bottom of the lagoon.
“Remember how we had to explain to you that Cruella de Vil wasn’t a nice lady?” Riki said.
“I was seven. I thought she liked puppies.”

Can you read a book with conversations like this and not be charmed? I cannot.

Now I have read reviews that criticized the books because of these weird, unbelievable, unrelatable characters. I am here to tell you that there really ARE people like that. And it is refreshing sometimes to see oneself in print.

Death at Morning House on Amazon

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