Ghost Messages
Coteau Books / 29 June 2011

Ghost Messages by Jacqueline Guest Published by Coteau Books for Kids Review by Jessica Bickford $8.95 13:9781550504583 Ailish O’Connor is like any other thirteen year old girl living in Ireland in 1865, except she has what her father calls the “fey gift”. Ailish can see into your soul with the touch of her hand. She uses her gift to keep her and her father fed, telling fortunes that most think are a “penny’s entertainment” until her Da brings Rufus Dalton to their wagon. Ailish feels his darkness, but doesn’t know just how evil he is until she wakes up to find her father near death, and their one precious possession, a golden figurine which was to be their future, stolen. In Jacqueline Guest’s newest juvenile fiction Ghost Messages, a young girl is faced with a ship-full of trouble and will do anything to ensure the future of her and her father. This includes sneaking on to the Great Eastern as it departs Ireland for its mission to lay the first transatlantic telegraph cable between Europe and North America, cutting her long hair, donning trousers, and putting in her labour as a cabin boy. Luckily she meets David Jones, who is…