Brightwood by Tania Unsworth

Like tendrils of vines enclosing a castle in the woods, the suspense and slow-building chills of Tania Unsworth’s Brightwood will weave a spell around you. If you’ve ever spent any time in a large, old house with its creaks, cracked walls, and dust covered everything you will get a sense of how it feels to live inside Brightwood Hall. Daisy, a strong, curious eleven year old girl who loves to climb the tall storage units inside and the sprawling fields outside, lives in Brightwood Hall with her mum and she has never ever left its grounds.

When we first meet Daisy she has just woken up to the sounds of a car engine starting from her driveway. Daisy didn’t know that her mum was leaving the house especially because it wasn’t her usual day to go shopping. Daisy isn’t worried though because her mum always comes back home by 11am on the dot. 

More and more time passes and mum still does not appear so when Daisy suddenly hears a car outside she is heartbroken to see that it is not her mother but instead a strange man. In one particularly intense scene Daisy is watching as the man steadfastly makes his way from his car towards the house. Daisy knows she is safe inside the impenetrable Brightwood Hall but instantly her heart plunges down to her stomach because she realizes the front door is open…

Things progress very quickly once she is face to face with the stranger James Gritting: “He moved in a loose, clumsy way that made Daisy shudder slightly. As if his arms and legs weren’t attached in the usual way. As if he had been put together slightly wrong” (p.63). Daisy is pretty sure that Gritting means her harm especially if she’s all that stands in his way to being the sole occupant of Brightwood Hall.

Join Daisy, her rat friend Tar, and a few resident ghosts for a creepy, thrilling, edge-of-your-seat adventure to see if Daisy will survive long enough to ever see her mum again. 

-Cara