Dead Girls Don’t Dream
by Nino Cipri
High School    Holt    304 pp.
11/24    9781250791405    $19.99
e-book ed.  9781250791412    $11.99

Sisters Riley and Sam help their uncle run his museum of dark folklore and unexplained disappearances next to spooky Voynich Woods. One day, Sam flees into the woods to escape a rude tourist; Riley goes after her and is murdered. But magically endowed Madelyn, who lives in the woods with her abusive Mother, finds Riley’s grave under the creepy “Wishing Tree” and brings her back, albeit with a hole in her chest filled with a “black, half-solid ooze.” While Riley returns home and tries to hide the change death has wrought in her, Madelyn begins to learn what (or who) has been fueling the tree, which gives Mother her power. This compelling novel features many horror staples freshly woven together: a partially decayed, drowned ghost girl who can travel anywhere water flows and who helps Riley and Madelyn; a voracious tree with a hunger for vengeance; a man created by Mother, stuffed with “twisted, rusted nails,” who helps with her grisly business; and a nineteenth-century family tragedy with long coattails in the present. Less common in the horror genre but welcome here are a blossoming romance between Riley and Madelyn and a feminist message of ownership over one’s own body, something Madelyn has never known, so that by the end of this harrowing tale, Cipri—and readers—have earned the hopeful ending.

From the March/April 2025 issue of The Horn Book Magazine.