All The Lovely Bad Ones **

Written byMary Downing Hahn.
Published by Sandpiper 2009.
192 pages.

        This is a ghost story about two mischeivous children who visit their grandmother's bed and breakfast which had a haunted reputation. But since Grandmother bought it, that activity  has disappeared.  The two kids hear the stories and decide to put on a little spook show themselves.  But they find out that they have woken up some ghosts.  Ghost children to be exact.  These children are mischeivous too, but in the end, we learn that they want help from the live children.

It seems that the bed and breakfast used to be an orphange run by a selfish, cheating violent woman who mistreated them.  In fact they all had died at her hand.  They want to put her spirit to rest, so that they may rest their spirits since this woman still haunts them, even in the afterlife.  The two live children feel obliged or perhaps coerced into helping the children ghosts and a series of adventures and scary happenings occur.

I'm not a typical horror book reader, so it's difficult to judge this book.  It seems fine to me, though the characters mightt seem a little undelineated and sketchy.  They don't seem to be fully devloped, but I believe that is a typical thing with the horror genre and other fantasy genres.  The genre is long on fantasy and short on character devlopment.

There is a nice rendering of the incidents that happens in the orphanage's past which are pretty spooky an kind of grim.  Over all, I enjoyed the book.