Katya Balen, Ghostlines, Bloomsbury Children’s Books, January 2025, 288 pp., RRP $16.99 (pbk), ISBN 9781526663870
Tilda lives on the wild fictional island of Ayrie. She loves that it’s a place where everyone knows and helps each other and where she and her friends know every pool, every pathway, every cave. It’s an idyllic kind of lifestyle in which the only blot appears to be that her older brother Rowan has left under a cloud after a row with their mum and dad.
The mystery of what has happened to Rowan is one of several ‘ghostlines’ that haunt Tilda. Another is what ails new island arrival Albie, an introverted, unforthcoming boy who seemingly hates everything Tilda loves: the wildness, the isolation, the natural matiness of the island’s inhabitants. Tilda makes it her mission to get Albie to love Ayrie, but he cocks a snook at everything she shows him, until in desperation Tilda suggests they go to a nearby secret island.
Tilda’s mum and dad have forbidden her to visit this unnamed island. She’s been told it’s dangerous to get there; it’s haunted; a boy died there. Of course, it’s the perfect place for a couple of tweens to go off on an adventure of exploration, which is precisely what Tilda and Albie do. Without telling anyone where they’re going, they head off in Tilda’s dragon-themed sea kayak, threading a line through half-submerged lines of dagger rocks, following the reputed ghostlines of scores of boats that have carved their way across the sea through danger to safety over many hundreds of years.
Author Katya Balen, who has previously penned 2022 Carnegie Medal award-winning October, October, amongst other novels for children, has crafted a tender mystery romance for tweens against the backdrop of a wild, isolated place. The central character of Tilda, who narrates the novel from the ‘I’ speaking voice, is particularly well realized, her inner thoughts coming across all too believably in a jumble of run-on clauses, as she worries and frets about whether she’s doing the right thing or not. Albie too develops realistically as the tween who turns from Tilda’s reluctant, disgruntled companion to engaged, determined friend.
The ghostlines of sea voyages past, connecting people across time and space, is the underlying thematic throughline: a throughline made all the more poignant as Tilda realizes her own heart connections by story end.
Recommended for young readers (aged 10+) who enjoy thoughtful, lyrical writing set in the great outdoors.
Reviewed by Suzanne Ingelbrecht
