This was AMAZING!! Creepy AF ghosts, WLW romance, a cute dog sidekick- what more could you want? It reminded me of great horror movies that center around paranormal investigations (Grave Encounters, anyone?) and I definitely recommend this to all ghost fans.

I really enjoyed this! There were a lot of creepy moments and the pacing was great throughout.

Dare is running a podcast on ghost stories. She's always been interested in seeing a ghost, but she always just finds the truth with supposed hauntings. Dare can figure out why there's a shadow or weird sounds. At this point, she's pretty sure ghosts aren't real, but she's not quite ready to give up. When she is contacted about an old house being rehabbed, she decides to sign up to help. There is a ghost story she'd love to solve. A young girl drowned when she was a teenager. The lake could be dangerous, but there was something weird. Atheleen was sunken and skeletal when found. That couldn't happen that quickly from drowning in a lake. Dare wants to figure out what really happened. Was Atheleen killed? She joins two other teens, Quinn and Holly, to work for the summer. Dare becomes friends with the others quickly. And maybe even more with Quinn. Quinn was already at the house and was sure she was being haunted before Dare got there. The girls work on the house, but they also start searching for answers. They find out that there is more than one death at this lake and they're all young girls. The house starts acting out and the lake is growing. Things flood, bells that are disconnected make sounds, and then the bruises show up. Dare is sure there are explanations for everything, but the house is sure to make her a believer. The girls learn the truth and need to stay alive.

I gave this book 4 1/2 stars rounded up to 5 on Goodreads.

Warnings for illness (diabetes), drowning, ghost stories, hauntings, and death.

3.5*

I really loved the ending of this, I think it was explosive and intense! It had interesting characters and a lot of heart into each scene which was beautiful.
This was a very well written story but a little too fluffy at times that took away from the horror part. It felt a bit out of place and I found it strange the main character strictly didn’t believe in ghosts—but runs a very popular podcast about them.

Overall, it was an enjoyable read and perfect for spooky months!

I absolutely loved this creepy YA horror. Haunted house + haunted lake + bisexual protagonist and sapphic love interest? Absolutely my cup of tea. Thank you for sending me the widget! My review will be up on my instagram soon...

Many thanks to NetGalley and Penguin Teen for an e-ARC. All opinions are my own.

At the heart of it, The Girls Are Never Gone is a ghost story. I won't spoil anything for the plot, but I really enjoyed reading this one. I guessed the main twist about halfway through, but was still invested in trying to figure everything else out. I loved Dare as a main character and enjoyed the podcast transcripts that were at the end and beginning. Books with mixed media typically become one of my favorites. I'm not one who is big on spooky, but The Girls Are Never Gone felt like the perfect amount of spooky for a YA novel. It'd be perfect for October!

I was left with a few questions at the ending. I'd love to read a story about Holly as part of her ending is open-ended. Overall, I was really pleased with the story and look forward to reading more by Sarah Glenn Marsh.

The Conjuring meets Sadie when seventeen-year-old podcaster Dare takes an internship in a haunted house and finds herself in a life-or-death struggle against an evil spirit.

Rep: Bisexual chronically ill female MC (type 1 diabetes), sapphic Bourican/biracial love interest.

CWs: Animal death (not on page, but skeletons are found), blood, chronic illness (type 1 diabetes), death, ghostly haunting, medical content, murder, stalking, toxic relationship, violence, vomit.

I loved the mix of horror, ghosts and murder mystery this book had going on. It was the perfect creepy atmosphere and it definitely helped that we had two sapphic MCs.

Wow. The Girls Are Never Gone is officially in the running for my favorite book of the year.

This book follows Dare as she heads to a haunted house for the summer to volunteer but also record a podcast. Dare has diabetes and a service dog named Waffles 🧇 I loved that Dare was so strong. The disability rep was great and Dare showed just how strong you can be.

Side note: the dog does not die!! There were a few times where Waffles was in danger and it had me on the edge of my seat.

The other girls at the house, Holly and Quinn, were such great friends. They openly accepted each other and stuck together the whole way.

I really enjoyed Cathy and would’ve loved to see more from her. As for Rose, I had a feeling she was Augusta very early on.

I’m honestly shocked by the ended. Not only Rose dying, but Holly likely being dead. The Holly thing really threw me for a loop.

This book genuinely scared. I wasn’t expecting it to as much as it did, but it was just so well written. Sarah Glenn Marsh made such an eerie setting. Everything just worked so well.

I know I’m going to be thinking about this cool for a long time.

Thank you to Penguin Teen and Netgalley for the arc of this book!

Content Warnings at end of review.

This is a dark and twisty queer ghost story following Dare, a bi teenage paranormal podcaster as she investigates the mystery around Arrington Estate and Atheleen Bell's mysterious drowning 30 years prior. She gets to the house as an intern for Rose, who is restoring the estate to become a museum. and is joined by Rose's daughter, Quinn, and Holly, another intern. Dare expects to spend her summer debunking the ghost myths surrounding the estate, and instead is forced to confront the dark mysteries of the house that started long before Atheleen Bell's death.

I adored this book! It kept me up late because I could not put it down. It is so atmospheric and creepy and spine-tingling. The sapphic relationship is to die for (hah, no pun intended) and I love how off-kilter I felt while reading! It seemed like anyone could be a suspect and something creepy and sinister was around every page.

The ending also absolutely blew me away. I won't spoil anything here, but it took a turn I did not expect but absolutely loved!

I thought the character development was quite good and I will say this is hands down the best ghost story I've read!

Pub date: September 7, 2021
Content Warnings
Graphic: Chronic illness, Vomit, and Medical content
Moderate: Animal death, Death, Child death, Death of parent, and Body horror
Minor: Stalking, Murder, Blood, and Violence

"Don’t worry, Mom. If I want to have a wild night while I’m here, it won’t be with a boy—it’ll be with a Ouija board and a couple of dead Victorian girls.” - The Girls Are Never Gone

The Girls Are Never Gone is a spoopy YA book by Sarah Glenn Marsh & published by @penguinteen this September!

It follows Dare, a paranormal podcaster who takes an internship at a historical estate in order to get an in & investigate its ghostly past for her listeners, with the help of her new friend, Holly, her new crush, Quinn, & perhaps most importantly, her service dog, Waffles. 🐕

This book has a big, old, haunted house, a vengeful ghost, an interesting back story, a little romance, & a good cast of characters—both living & dead. I liked the concept of Dare investigating for a podcast, bringing ghost hunting into the modern era.

Another cool thing about this book is that the MC has type 1 diabetes, helping to shatter stereotypes & misconceptions about the disease & showing how she navigates her diagnosis as a teenager while still living her life to the fullest. I loved how respectful & supportive her new friends were in the book, immediately doing research so that they could support her & help her to the best of their ability when needed. It really warmed my heart to read. I think this is good rep to have in books especially books for young adults.

The things that I didn't like were that most of the "twists" were very predictable and I guessed them pretty early on in the book. This isn't always a bad thing and you can still have a good time reading the book, but it took away some of the "thriller" aspect of the book. I also thought some of the dialogue was really stilted and unnatural and just didn't sound like how people speak to one another at all. Other than that, it was a pretty good spoopy read and I'd give it like 3.5/5 stars, but of course since we don't have halves I'll round up to 4.

DNF at 32%, I was just so bored and it felt like there was a whole lot of nothing happening. Not for me.

I feel like this book may have been a little bit misleading with the way it was promoted. I know it was advertised as being similar to The Conjuring" which might have raised my hopes a little bit too high. Was it scary? No, not really which is why it didn't really do it for me. I was expecting more of a creepy ghost story experience but instead it felt like a Goosebumps novel but aged up a a few years. My thoughts aren't all negative, though. I did like how technically it is young adult but it could even be a gateway to books written for older readers. You know how New Adult is a bridge between YA to Adult? The Girls Are Never Gone is like a bridge from YA to NA, if that makes sense. I also really liked the chronic disease representation, I haven't seen that much in my recent reads. I don't have a chronic illness but I have been part of the disabled community and I appreciate how our MC refers to her diabetes when talking about it in relation to society. It does get so annoying having to explain yourself everywhere you go, especially to random strangers. All in all, I liked the writing and I thought the characters and story were okay, I guess I was just expecting more Halloween scary/spooky and instead, I got a leveled up Goosebumps.

The cover for this book is stunning. Having read Sarah's other books, I was super excited when she announced this title. This story is twisted and spooky. It's a perfect fall read.

The Girls Are Never Gone follows 17-year-old podcaster Dare, who travels to a remote town for an internship in an old haunted house. The goal of her internship is to work with the two other interns and restore the house to turn it into a historical museum. She does not believe in ghosts, but what she sees at the Arrington Estate starts to change her mind.

This is how you write a YA thriller!! The "Sadie" meets "The Conjuring" description is 100% accurate.

I loved each of the characters and how we were made to question their involvement in the situation. Waffles the dog always made me so happy!

I thought the book was a little inconsistent in terms of pacing (sometimes multiple days were skipped, sometimes the same day dragged out for multiple chapters), but I was always hooked.

I was never entirely terrified to the point where I was scared of the noises in my house, but I definitely felt some white-knuckle anxiety while holding my kindle because I wanted to know what happened next.

I highly recommend giving this book a try!

Thank you to Penguin Young Readers and Netgalley for the ARC!

This is a perfect mixture of the haunting of hill house and bly manor in a subtle creepy, quick YA setting. I went into this book expecting a few spooky moments but not knowing an awful lot. I raced through this book, the writing was really accessible and easy to understand while also still lending itself well to the confusion that typically accompanies a ghost story esque book.

The story itself I really enjoyed, I found the characters easy to get on with even if I didn't become overly attached to them and enjoyed the narrative of our main character. The plot twist I guessed at but never actually thought I was right so I still enjoyed it when it happened and was intrigued to see how the story would actually end. There were times I felt myself becoming a bit freaked out even if I was never actually fully scared, there was always a slight air of anxiety surrounding me as I got deeper and deeper into the story which is all I can ask for from a YA Horror. i also didn't know this was queer going in so really enjoyed that development into a nice little relationship between two of the characters!

Altogether I enjoyed this book and found the plot very intriguing, the writing is quick to get through and easy to understand. I would definitely recommend this to readers who love the subtleness and more to the eye style of the Netflix haunting of hill house and bly manor shows!

I received an ARC of this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

CW: drowning, disfigured corpses, animal death

"Most ghosts are hoaxes, but this one isn't."

The Girls Are Never Gone immediately has big shoes to fill just based on the opening of it's blurb "The Conjuring meets Sadie." We join 17 year old Dare, a former small scale YouTube star, on a podcast investigation of a supposedly haunted Virginia estate with a history of mysterious disappearances and drownings in it's lake, while on a summer internship to assist in restoring and preserving the sprawling house. Along the way, she makes some friends and develops a crush on Quinn, one of her fellow interns and the daughter of the head of the project. Quinn is convinced there're ghosts afoot, but Dare takes a more skeptical approach and tries to debunk any potential evidence they find. Of course though, the haunting doesn't stay very quiet for long

I'm a huge fan of The Conjuring series, so I immediately wanted to see if this book could live up to that kind of expectation. Does it? Not quite, nothing in this book ever caught me off guard or was scary. But maybe for someone who doesn't consume horror movies as voraciously as I do will find some spooky moments in here. There are plenty of ghosts around, but I think by following the perspective of a skeptical character, the scares are a little less effective because she's always explaining them away or missing them entirely. And then eventually it gets a little more frustrating when the stakes get higher and she's still attempting to weakly logic away everything she experiences.

While the story is overall enjoyable and interesting, I think the pacing was off. The first half of the book is fine taking place over the course of maybe two weeks (which I did think the passage of time was a little difficult to keep track of in this book), but the second half all takes place in like one maybe two days and instead of it picking up speed like the story clearly wants to, you end up feeling like you're slogging through it just because of how long those days last compared to all the others in the book so far.

Most of the characters are pleasant, and Dare is an enjoyable main character, she's the only character who is really fleshed out in the book. I thought that the inclusion of her having Type 1 diabetes was great and did add an appropriate level of suspense to moments in the book. Everyone else, including her love interest Quinn, remain one dimensional. The few adults in the book are the ones who probably suffer the most from this, as they're often not given any thought at all and remain oblivious and ineffective. Rose is probably the weirdest character in the whole book. She's Quinn's mom, but the two hardly interact the whole book for very little reason. I know that this is a Teen book, and naturally adults don't tend to be the biggest players in them, but for some reason the way the two adults in this book acted just felt off to me.

The concluding action, or as I like to say, the Boss Fight, was a little confusing to keep track of what was happening and where characters were spatially. I think this was because the book wasn't an action book and the setting wasn't grounded enough for the character movements to make a lot of sense.

I did enjoy the end of the book, and was pretty satisfied with how it closed. I appreciated the epilogue, so there was a little glimpse of what happened after the Boss Fight and I liked the way the romance ended up as I thought it was a little more realistic with characters in their late teens.

This book was pretty good overall though, and is a decent pick for any teens looking for a lgbtq+ horror read. If you're a huge horror fan this might not keep you up at night though.

This was a super engaging and fast pace read. I thought this book was a fun balance between mystery and also a supernatural mystery. I also really did enjoy the podcast element at the heart of this read. I also loved the LGBTQ romance at the heart of the book. This book also had a very eerie and creepy setting that captured me, This book also a very female focused cast. The reveal was one that I did not predict and it was super engaging read. I liked how she kept it open to maybe writing more with these characters in the future. Def a prefect summer/ early fall read. It would classify this book as eerie but not horror. I also thought the rep for diabetes was a type of rep. I had not read before!! Great work, def check it out!

This was queer, this was creepy, and this was just damn good. When the synopsis mentioned the Conjuring….it was NOT lying.

It did take a me a minute to get into the story, but once I did that was all she wrote. I was left with a few questions, so I’m hoping there is a book two.

Thank you to Penguin Razorbill and NetGalley for the advanced copy!

I'm not going to provide any spoilers because the story is too good not to unravel yourself, but I will share some of the things that made this story stand out to me.

1. Ghost stories always irritate me because the characters chose to stay in a haunted place. This story realistically showed why the different character chose to stay even when creepy things started happening. It was very believable and that made the story truly stand out to me.

2. I really liked the representation of a type 1 diabetic and how it affected her daily life.

3. Waffles was so adorable.

4. The way that the novel ends is open ended but also realistic.

My students always love horror/ghost stories, so I will be recommending this novel to them.

A perfect book to read near Halloween! Loved the podcast element and the spooky house vibes! I did find it a little slow and wished it picked up sooner but other than that it was a spooky horror YA book perfect for the fall!

A breathless page-turner, this novel kept me up way too late reading! This is Sarah Glenn Marsh's best novel yet, and once you start, you won't be able to put it down. Just keep the lights on!