The Ghost Hunter’s Daughter by Caroline Flarity

East Side Press, 2019

ISBN-13: 978-0996845007

Available: Paperback, Kindle edition



Anna Fagan lives in a haunted house, but that’s the least of her problems. Her father, Jack, is well-known for his ability to “clear” spirits from the objects they haunt, but since the traumatic death of her mother, his ability is fading and he’s picked up the habit of hoarding, aggressively. He stores holy water in the refrigerator, and “cleared” objects in the basement, where Anna is forbidden to go (the results of Jacks’s hoarding exposed when Anna breaks into the basement later in the story is one of the most appalling things in the book: previously haunted objects are the least of the problems). Now the lack of space has led Jack to rent an office to reinvigorate his business. He has hired a new investigator, Geneva Sanders, a scientist who has invented a new way to see the electrical activity that indicates that ghosts and supernatural forces are at work.

Anna is also suffering from grief and guilt over her mother’s death, but at school, she has other problems. With the exception of her friends Doreen and Freddy, Anna is mocked by other students with the nickname “Goblin Girl”. Izzy, the school sleazebucket, has decided she’d make a perfect target for his meanness and slut-shaming, while also throwing disgusting homophobic slurs at Freddy. Anna, focused on getting her crush, Craig, to notice her, while trying to manage her family problems and an uptick in paranormal activity, misses out on the serious problems Doreen and Freddy are dealing with. As levels of hostility and violence rise in town, Geneva theorizes that unusual solar flares are being harnessed by a malevolent spirit who is using them to feed on people’s anger and pain.

Flarity’s choice to make Anna the point-of-view character works beautifully here. There is so much going on in this book, especially in the larger picture of things, and yet we see that world through the self-centered tunnel vision of a teenager– which is perfect for a teenager in a YA novel. Our view widens with hers, and we see the story pull together as she does. Getting the story from Anna’s point of view means we are up close to her character growth.

This book reminds me a lot of Lois Duncan’s YA books, except that her books didn’t have the broader supernatural conspiracy behind this story. I’m not sure how many boys would choose to read this, but I hope they will, because there are parts that should really make them think. How many people say and do things without thinking, especially when they are angry or feeling hopeless, that regret it later?

Recommended.



Contains: suicide, suicidal ideation, mental illness (hoarding), self-harm, animal cruelty, bullying, abusive adults, violence, cyberbullying. rape culture, distribution of provocative images of a minor.

The Ghost Hunter's Daughter is a Teen Horror aimed primarily at 15-16 year olds. That being said, I did really enjoy this. It's nice to have a simple easy read sometimes that doesn't require a huge amount of focus to understand what's happening and who's who. What I particularly loved about the book is that there isn't a long drawn out buildup at the beginning. From the first page we are thrown straight in to the paranormal goodness. Our protagonist is a teenage girl who's Father is a Ghost Hunter by profession and we see that she is drawn in to that world with him from a young age. What I found particularly appealing was that the protagonist wasn't a Miss Goody Two Shoes, supermodel protege who is perfect at everything in life. Whenever I read teen/YA my inner teenage frizzy haired, spotty, geeky girl is driven bonkers by the 'chosen one' type trope or the girl that is so good at everything and is incredibly beautiful but just doesn't realise it. So our protagonist being a realistic 'normal' girl who is bullied, has a bit of a crappy life, has real emotions, and makes mistakes is greatly appreciated. Personally, I think we need more of this type of main character in our teen/YA books to teach our kids that they don't have to be perfect to succeed!

Several times in the books we get snippets of text where we gain insights into other characters' thoughts and emotions and I really enjoyed this format to give a more rounded view of the events.

There are trigger warnings for suicide, sexual abuse, mental illness, bullying and self harm but personally I feel that they are quite mild, age appropriate and well written.

3,5 stars rounded up to 4! The Ghost Hunter’s Daughter is not what one expects when picking up a Young Adult fantasy book. Don’t be fooled by the fact that the main character is a teen, because you’ll find many dark themes in this story. Please be aware of several trigger warnings, such as self-mutilation, suicide, heavy bullying and child sexual abuse. Personally, I don’t mind reading about those things because what I normally read is quite gruesome, but I thought you should know, just in case.

While I think this book needs some editing, I really enjoyed the story and everything that’s underlying the main plot. I loved how the main character evolves, the way she learns and grows up, as she lives her difficult life in a small cursed town.

There are many far-fetched things, but I don’t feel like everything is supposed to add up in this story. Even while battling a demon, or a dark entity or a Trickster, the most important thing is still what happens inside the characters, their love towards their friends and family, and the mind-and-body connection they manage to maintain in the midst of everything falling apart.

This is a dark, but very sweet book, and I’m glad I picked it up.

I'm not much of a horror reader because I don't like gore, but I've been branching out lately. I figured a YA horror would be a little more "safe" for me, and I was not prepared for the intricate layers in this beautiful book.

Anna (aka "Goblin Girl") is the daughter of a paranormal investigator who kind of made me think of Sam and Dean's dad in Supernatural if he hadn't been as awesome. I didn't *like* Anna much, but part of that may have been due to the events going on in their little town of GenericSmalltownName. I feel like she had some good personal growth by the end of the book, and having a likeable main character seems to matter less to me in this genre than it does when I read romance, so it didn't really affect my rating. But she's kind of a jerk to her friends, and that dynamic was more believe to me than the quasi-love triangle going on. I had to keep reminding myself that she's 16, haha.

I love that Caroline Flarity kept me guessing about what was causing all the hoopla and craziness. The Ghost Hunter's Daughter has a lot of fun twists and turns, and is creepy without being TOO scary. Basically it's the perfect Halloween read and a fun way for the non-horror read to dip their toes into the genre.

Thank you Netgalley for sending me this arc. I will be reviewing this book in the near future with an honest rating and review.

Arc provided by NetGalley. This is a paranormal middle school ya book. I enjoyed the book but I thought the story line could move at a faster pace. It’s surprisingly dark. I wasn’t expecting that. . Anna is a high schooler, who has lost her mother and her father is a hoarder. She is having social problems because her daughter is a ghost hunter( he removes spirits from objects) and he has a hoarding problem that explains a into the yard and his car. She has a group of friends and a boyfriend. The other kids pick on her to no end. She lost her mother when an evil spirit possessed her. Things to start to get worse when she abandons her friends, who have alway been around for bad boyfriend Craig.
She begins to get support from her dads new assurance Genevieve. Anna starts researching more and uncovers some evil spirits at work.

Review: 4/5 stars
The Ghost Hunter's Daughter is a Teen Horror aimed primarily at 15-16 year olds. That being said, I did really enjoy this. It's nice to have a simple easy read sometimes that doesn't require a huge amount of focus to understand what's happening and who's who. What I particularly loved about the book is that there isn't a long drawn out buildup at the beginning. From the first page we are thrown straight in to the paranormal goodness. Our protagonist is a teenage girl who's Father is a Ghost Hunter by profession and we see that she is drawn in to that world with him from a young age. What I found particularly appealing was that the protagonist wasn't a Miss Goody Two Shoes, supermodel protege who is perfect at everything in life. Whenever I read teen/YA my inner teenage frizzy haired, spotty, geeky girl is driven bonkers by the 'chosen one' type trope or the girl that is so good at everything and is incredibly beautiful but just doesn't realise it. So our protagonist being a realistic 'normal' girl who is bullied, has a bit of a crappy life, has real emotions, and makes mistakes is greatly appreciated. Personally, I think we need more of this type of main character in our teen/YA books to teach our kids that they don't have to be perfect to succeed!
Several times in the books we get snippets of text where we gain insights into other characters' thoughts and emotions and I really enjoyed this format to give a more rounded view of the events.
There are trigger warnings for suicide, sexual abuse, mental illness, bullying and self harm but personally I feel that they are quite mild, age appropriate and well written.

For someone who spent most of her teenage years obsessed with CW’s <i>Supernatural</i>, <i>The Ghost Hunter’s Daughter</i> was just too good to pass up on. I love the supernatural and I’m always interested to see how authors play with the existing lore, so I was only too eager to start this book. My interest sadly dwindled about a third of a way through, but then came back somewhat for the climax. Perhaps I would have loved this book more if I had still been that Supernatural obsessed teen, though on the whole I did find the book enjoyable.

<b>premise</b>
Anna Fagan is only all too familiar with the spiritual and supernatural, what with her dad being a professional ghost hunter and her mother having been killed in a demonic possession. The easiest part is dealing with the mischievous spirits around her house; it’s all the other stuff that makes her life a living hell. Her dad’s a hoarder, her mother’s dead, her classmates bully her, her few friendships seem to be falling apart, her crush doesn’t seem to like her back, and on top of that she is plagued by strange headaches, violent thoughts, and nightmares. Could these be caused by the solar flares that she keeps hearing about on the news? And is it just her, or do other people seem to affected too? Anna will have to face her figurative and literal demons in order to get to the bottom of things and figure out what is really going on
.
<b>thoughts</b>
While I enjoyed the premise of the book, its execution was not wholly for me. It’s pretty fast-faced, but the actual plot takes a little while to properly set in, and some of the peripheral episodes felt a little unnecessary and too drawn-out (e.g. the Izzy plot line added absolutely nothing for me and just made me feel uncomfortable). Although the book is aimed at (older) teens, the plot features some quite dark themes such as suicidal thoughts, self-harming, self-loathing, and sexual assault. Although much of the characters’ behavior – sometimes overly sexual and violent – can partly be put down to very legitimate plot reasons, it still made me feel a little uneasy at times. The characters additionally just fell a little flat for me. I didn’t particularly care for Anna and I’m not entirely sure if that’s just because the author is very good at describing a hormonal, rebellious teen dealing with some bad juju or because Anna was just not a very likable character, but whichever the case, I certainly rolled my eyes at her quite a bit. Most of the other characters, such as Anna’s dad and her friends, suffer from the same problem, namely that they are not all that compelling to me to begin with and on top of that are affected by some of the spooky plot elements, which makes them even less likable. Although there is thus largely a reason why the characters behave the way they do, I still struggled to look past this. The issue is somewhat resolved by the end of the book, but did diminish my interest a little, as my enjoyment of a book strongly depends on how I feel about the main characters, which in this case wasn’t all that great.
The supernatural elements that are sprinkled through the book and underlie the plot are actually quite good. It’s not just your run-of-the-mill spirits and demons and TV-exorcisms and the author definitely gives her own spin on things. Although not entirely for me, it definitely veers into some darker and more gritty territory – think a little bit more <i>American Horror Story</i> than <i>Supernatural</i> – which I had not expected. Kudos for this as it certainly added to the spook-factor of the book and made it stand out from the other horror/supernatural stuff that I have read.

<b>so…?</b>
Overall, The Ghost Hunter’s Daughter is a solid, quick, and easy read, though perhaps not for the faint of heart, and not entirely for me. The book mostly does what it says on the tin and certainly delivers on its supernatural elements. This being the author’s debut novel, I’m curious to see what she will do next.

Rating: <b>3 stars</b>

<i>I was provided with a copy of The Ghost Hunter's Daughter through NetGalley in exchange for an honest review</i>

This could have been so good but I just could not gel with this book. The premise sounded super interesting and it had the potential to be really good but it just wasn't there. The main character did not seem too believable or interesting and this is where I generally stopped caring with the book as i did not want to continue with a character I did not care about.

So there's about 20% Supernatural in this book, and the rest is Mean Girls if you took out the fun. What you get is a book that's 80% about characters who actually are awful in an uninteresting way being put into situations that are meant to make you uncomfortable. Creepy, it is not. Fun, it is not.

I had no connection to Anna as a character, and as she grew more nasty in her thoughts, this did not improve. We were supposed to feel the strong connection with her friends, but it never clicked for me, and her father and his hoarding ways was cast in such a negative light from beginning to end, that there was no hope of him being anything but a source of frustration for Anna and the reader.

The book treats mental illness as nothing but a plot point. Suicide and suicidal thoughts, self-harm, hoarding, pedophilia, stalking, verbal abuse, sexual abuse, animal abuse: all part of the atmosphere of the book, without diving deeper into how they affect the person and the people around them beyond the general "everything is awful' feeling throughout the book.

The book is told in 3rd-person from Anna's POV, except that there are these random italicized hops into other people's POVs starting in part 2. Just two plus a longer section hopping in-and-out of Anna's friend's head. If the author wanted to have multiple POVs in the novel, it should have been written that way, not sprinkled with these head hops without explanation.

There's a little improvement in the story when the actual supernatural stuff happens. Even the infodump about what kind of entities there are (most of which doesn't apply to this story) that occurs 30% of the way into the story seemed more interesting than the entire part 1. In fact, in many ways, I might have enjoyed the book more if it had started at the almost natural starting point of part 2, but I was already skeeved out by every single character's actions in part 1. And since that continued all the way to the end, the book just never got past the uncomfortable stage for me.

Recommended for fans of: readers who like to watch people be uncomfortably disturbing with a little bit of supernatural mixed in, random headhops, boar spirits

Note: I received a copy of the book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review

Dark, creepy, sleeping with the light on sort of read. If you're into the spooky, this book is for you!

Thrilling story, great plot and characters that keep you guessing right til the end. Great for fans of this genre. Really enjoyable.

This book was scary but really well done it didn't do cheap stuff that I could normally find in a book about ghost hunters. I had all the lights on in my flat while reading this.
The cover is well done.

I read this in one sitting and was gripped from the start! This had a fast paced well written storyline covering grief and social issues to name but a few. I can’t wait for the next instalment and see how the characters develop!

I received a free digital copy of this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.


I really wish I had paid a bit more attention to the trigger warnings on this book. The Ghost Hunter’s Daughter while amazing, was also incredibly triggering for me for many reasons (i.e Pedophilia, bullies, suicide, sucide idealization, self harm, etc..) I actually had to step away from reading on several different occasions just to calm myself down. Nevertheless, I decided to power through and finish the book.


The story follows a 16 year old Anna who sees creatures from another world. This tends to complicate her highschool career quite a bit. After her mother’s demonic episode leading to her suicide, Anna has a really hard time coping. She is bullied because of her father’s career as a ghost hunter and taunted by the nickname “goblin girl.”


Anna starts being haunted by nightmares, violent thoughts, etc. She knows that something supernatural must be at play and she must harness her connection to the source to uncover the truth.


Overall, it was a great read It was super dark and at times very heavy, but I love Caroline Flarity’s confidence in her writing. She wasn’t afraid to tackle uncomfortable subjects. I do recommend this book but I will say please heed the trigger warnings.


A personal thank you to NetGalley, East Side Press Publishing, and Caroline Flarity for allowing me to review this book.

At 59 years of age I am far from being a "young adult", but if the subject matter interests me I do enjoy the YA read here and there. The Ghost Hunter's Daughter checked all the boxes for me. At the age of eight Anna's mother death was caused by demonic possession Anna lives with her widower father Jack, who clears possessed objects for a living in a house full of "his things". Living with a hoarder. Anna has to navigate narrow passages between piles of dusty newpapers, and boxes of haunted objects and she also has to deal with the occasional Shadow Person and ever annoying Trickster. Life outside of the home she's known as "Ghoul Girl", so life isn't any easier beyond the dusty clutter.

I appreciate that the author does not write with stereotypes. The adults are written with realism, they are not all written as fools to be made fun of. The teens are human and real. Anna wasn't a precocious, smart mouthed miniature adult like you see on sit-coms these days. She was written to act, talk and behave like the age her character meant to be. This book is not all about ghosts and goblins. I think that more than anything it's really about growing up, learning who you are and finding your strength. This is a great book for a young girl trying to do just that and if the ghostly aspects draw them to the title, even better. #netgalley #AGhostHunter'sDaughter

3.5 stars. The blurb had me intrigued because Supernatural and Mean girls together? Yes!
I had some trouble with the pacing of the book and our main heroine. But overall it was very enjoyable and I would recommend it as a Halloween read, because it has the right creepy atmosphere.

This book wasn’t what I was expecting – from the cover (and what a cover! That was enough to draw my attention to the book all on its own) I was expecting a gentle teen horror novel with a chain rattling ghost or two. I was delighted instead to be reading about some horrendously nasty hauntings and horrors of human behaviour, the fact that the main characters were teenagers didn’t mean the author pulled any punches.

Anna’s dad is a ghost hunter and the local oddball, and not shy about the fact so things are understandably difficult for her at home and at school. He’s been getting increasingly withdrawn since the death of her mother and she’s trying her best to survive her high school experience with the help her two best friends.

Things in town start getting weird, with some genuinely unsettling hauntings and behaviours and Anna steps up to deal with the paranormal problems all her loved ones now face.

I loved the author’s writing style, this is a coming of age story with a twist and I easily connected with each and every one of the characters.

The title is what grabbed me! And the cover is pretty darn good. I love anything paranormal in YA and this story did not disappoint. The beginning dragged a bit, but hold out because it really picks up and drags you in!

I love love love love love a great paranormal mystery. This book had everything that a young adult would want in a book. A spooky fast-paced page-turner that any paranormal mystery lover will enjoy.