Death at Morning House by Maureen Johnson

Death at Morning House is a YA that’s part historical mystery, part haunted house story. I enjoyed it, but I kept getting pulled out of the story because it seemed wildly implausible to me that the kids in the book were as unsupervised as they were.

In the present day, Marlowe Wexler is struggling with teenage awkwardness and realizing her own queer identity. When the book opens, she’s house-sitting for a friend of the family and an incident with a candle leads to the house burning down. Marlowe is from a small community and feels like she’s constantly under scrutiny as the girl who messed up and burned down a house, so when she gets the opportunity to get out of town for the summer she takes it.

Marlowe will be working at Morning House, a mansion built on an island where there were a series of tragic events. The Ralston family lived there in the 30s, and the patriarch was this weird doctor who adopted six children and then had the family isolated on the island where they followed a strict diet and exercise regimen. All of his kids were exceptional in some area (athletics, academics, art, music) which he believed was due to their lifestyle.

One summer in 1932, his youngest child drowns and his eldest falls from a balcony on the same day. Only one of the other children survives into old age, with the rest meeting tragic endings. As a result, the house has a haunted/spooky reputation and is preserved as a tourist trap and also historical site.

Marlowe will be living on the island with some other teenagers and one adult, a professor who is writing a book on the house. As soon as Marlowe gets there, spooky things begin to happen and there’s clearly tension between the teens, who are all locals and know each other. Then the professor goes missing.

The book flip flops between the thirties and present day, unraveling the history of the Ralston family and what really happened to the kids (a curse? bad luck?). In the present day, Marlowe is trying to figure out what happened to the professor who was writing a book on the Ralstons. The past sections tell us the true story of the tragic day two of them died. In addition to the missing professor, in the present day there are drains that emit bad smells, hidden rooms, and objects that seem to move around randomly. Of course the two timelines are linked.

I was entirely on board for the spooky stuff, the timelines, the mystery of what happened then and now – all of it. I just could not suspend my disbelief that the kids in the present day timeline would be left alone as much as they were. Early in the novel, when the professor goes missing and is presumed drowned, everyone just goes on with business as usual with the teenagers doing tours and living on the island. My adult perspective could not get past how odd that is.

Okay, so for context, I grew up in the 80’s and 90’s when we had an actual commercial come on at 10 pm to remind parents to locate their children.

I was partially feral for a portion of my childhood. I still don’t believe that if the only supervising adult just went missing (and is maybe dead), everyone’s parents would be like “Oh, yeah, sure, keep on working that summer job.” You can’t tell me the program would just move forward like nothing happened.

Also at one point a horrible storm is headed toward the island that will cut it off from the mainland and no adults care, I guess? Marlow for one is in contact with her parents, and they have to know a huge storm is coming because it’s newsworthy. There’s not even a text message reminding them to charge their phones?

And even if I can buy that all the parents in this scenario are just neglecting their kids, this whole enterprise would likely be shut down purely for insurance purposes. Can you imagine the liability insurance provider finding out that the entire island, a historical site, is being run by teenagers with no adult supervision? Somewhere a plaintiff attorney just got a tingle and they don’t know why.

Overall, the book was spooky without being scary and I loved the dual timeline aspect to it. I thought the mystery was resolved in a really satisfying way, and overall I enjoyed the premise and the thriller aspect.

But ultimately, my adult brain got in the way with too much reasonable thinking: the minute the only adult on the island went missing, the house would have been closed down and the teens sent home. Which would end the story, obviously.  If you can get past that adult brain perspective asking rational questions, it’s an intriguing and spooky historical mystery, but it was too much of a jump for me.