Ophie's Ghosts

In 1922, twelve-year-old Ophelia Harrison, called Ophie, is woken in the night by her father urging her to grab their savings, wake her mother and run, moments before white men burn their Georgia home. By morning she learns he had already been killed, and that what she saw was his ghost. Ophie and her mother move north to live with relatives in Pittsburgh, and instead of going to school Ophie goes to work as a maid at Daffodil Manor, the grand house of the wealthy Caruthers family. The manor turns out to be full of ghosts, and Ophie befriends one spirit whose death was never explained. Justina Ireland's first middle-grade novel blends a ghost story and mystery with the history of racism faced by Black Americans in the 1920s.