Thirteen year old Charly, her mother and older sister Nikki have moved from Alberta to Prince Edward Island following her parents' divorce. Having moved in with Grammie (Charly's maternal grandmother), everyone, Charly included, is experiencing some problems adjusting. Grammie and Charly's mother don't always get along, while Nikki seems more moody than usual. And while Charly seems to have adjusted better than her mother and sister, she does miss her father, her former home in Alberta, but most of all, she misses her best friend, Allie.

One day, Charly, Nikki and some other children break into an old, abandoned house on the Northumberland Strait, where Charly perceives a mysterious presence. Returning alone to the house the next day, she seemingly slips back in time and meets Katherine, the house's mysterious, sad inhabitant. As Charly and Katherine become friends, Charly realises that Katherine (who is, indeed, a ghost) is trapped in her former house, unable to find peace, due to her grief over the death of her infant son, Robert. By helping Katherine come to terms with Robert's death, to find peace, Charly herself learns not only to accept her new life, the divorce, the move to P.E.I., she also discovers that Katherine is/was intimately and personally connected with and to the family.

Although I would catergorise The Ghost of Northumberland Strait as a ghost story, the novel actually focuses more on family relationships and inter-personal conflicts than the supernatural. With that in mind, even readers who might tend to find ghost stories rather creepy and frightening would most likely not have any (or few) such issues with this novel; The Ghost of Northumberland Strait is basically a family story packaged in the loose wrappings of a ghost story, the supernatural.

The characters encountered throughout the novel are, for the most part, vividly and realistically depicted. Charly is an engaging narrator-protagonist, and while the narrative and flow of the text do appear a bit disjointed and distracted at times, this actually makes the story feel all the more realistic, all the more believable as being the thoughts and musings of a young teenage girl; Charly's distracted storylines and anecdotes appear very authentic, very typical. Grammie and Katherine are also very vividly drawn. You can almost feel and taste Katherine's fear and sadness, while the grandmother is clearly shown to be not only a person who believes in the uncanny and mysterious, she is also depicted as someone who actually and truly tries to listen (Charly's grandmother believes in her story that she has seen a ghost, while her own mother does not only not believe Charly at first, but has also been rather distant lately, too occupied with her own misery to be aware of Charly's problems and fears adjusting to the family's new life in P.E.I.).

Although at first I did find some of the frictions between Grammie and her daughters (Charly's mother and aunt) a bit puzzling and difficult to comprehend, one must remember, yet again, that the inter-generational conflicts and squabbles described in The Ghost of Northumberland Strait are reported through the filter, the lens of Charly's own voice and perception, that she might not know all of the relevant information, or might not have been told everything. For example, one of Charly's uncles died young, but since nobody in the family ever talks about this, there is no way for Charly and by extension the reader to know if some of the family conflicts might have their origin there (of course, I am only speculating here, but I just want to show that Charly's own perception, her knowledge of her family background or lack thereof might have made her descriptions of the frictions between her grandmother and her daughters seem somewhat lacking and unconvincing).

The only episode in The Ghost of Northumberland Strait that seems somewhat artificial (at least to me, personally) is the quite overtly Christian ceremony that Charly and her family have for Katherine at the town cemetery. Now, I actually think that the idea of a ceremony at the cemetery so that Katherine might finally find peace is a wonderful, hopeful idea in and of itself. But since organised religion, and specifically Christianity was never a major, relevant theme throughout most of the novel, the quite overtly Christian prayer and song (Amazing Grace) do feel a bit contrived and tacked on; a simple prayer or poem not specific to any organised religion would have felt more genuine, more natural. However, except for this minor little quibble, I quite enjoyed this story and would not hesitate to recommend this novel for older children above the age of nine or ten (especially young teenage girls). It is an engaging, sweet family story, with both a winsome and charming young protagonist as well as a winsome and charming ghost (both Charly and Katherine are treasures, and Grammie is also a true gem of a character). ( )