I loved this book! I think this might be my all time favourite YA novel, it has the perfect blend of intrigue, high school drama and the supernatural.

Allison returns to her birthplace with her adoptive parents, following the death of her biological grandmother. She inherits a house in the town of Danvers and moves there to finish her senior year of high school – this involves making new friends, enemies and learning about the history of the Salem witch trials.

This is the first book in a trilogy and focuses more on Allison’s introduction to the strange and Gothic town of Danvers than on her past, we have some nice clues about her parents and grandmother but nothing that the author is ready to reveal just yet. I really enjoyed the pacing for this reason and didn’t feel that too much information was being hurled at me too quickly.

The school drama is delicious; mean girls, jocks, goths, underage drinking and a makeover. Sometimes you just need these things in a novel!

When one of the girls in Allison’s class dies under suspicious circumstances, Allison is right in the thick of things – she does some classic sleuthing while getting herself in all sorts of tight scrapes and finds that the occult might be involved in the tragedy. This is a classic murder mystery, but the nature of the supernatural elements in this book are never fully laid out so you have to figure it out as you go.

Welcome to Danvers is an incredibly atmospheric book and a joy to read, I cannot wait for the rest of the series to be released!

About the Author

Penne Mayer is an author of young adult fiction. Her work is inspired by themes found in classic Gothic novels as well as stories that bring her back to those nostalgic teenage years when everything mattered. To Penne, a good book is one that incites the powerful emotions we experience so infrequently in real life, the kind that comes from moments we sometimes cherish, sometimes hate, but never forget.

Penne does her best plotting while hiking through the redwoods on a warm day. She has spent most of her life in northern California but has an on-going love affair with New England. She has never met a lobster she didn’t want to eat.