Ghostly menace, queer liberation, and sweet nonbinary romance all find room in this modern Irish contemporary. Sixteen-year-old Maeve Chambers, who is white, is behind in class; estranged from her Deaf, white best friend, Lily O'Callaghan; and sentenced to clean her crumbling girls' school's junk closet after throwing a shoe at her teacher. But there, she finds a decades-old tarot deck—and her first real talent. With her new business partner, biracial (Filipina/white) actor Fiona Buttersfield, Maeve starts making friends and money hand over fist reading tarot. But the deck keeps appearing suddenly, and its ominous extra card—the Housekeeper—is drawn in Lily's reading just before Lily disappears. As the Housekeeper infects Maeve's dreams, she must navigate a homophobic American evangelist cult, folkloric components, her growing attraction to Lily's genderqueer sibling, and her own hidden gifts to bring Lily home. O'Donoghue (Scenes of a Graphic Nature) infuses fierce integrity and an understanding of self-worth into a hilarious voice. While at times overfull, the novel's brilliant connections between friendship, boundaries, and the vulnerability of loneliness provide a vibrant compass for fans of Sarah Rees Brennan or Derry Girls. Final art not seen by PW. Ages 14–up. Agent: Bryony Woods, Diamond Kahn & Woods Literary. (Mar.)

Gr 9 Up—Getting detention is not out of character for Maeve Chambers, but when she is assigned to clean out the closet in the basement of her private school, she finds a mixtape and a deck of tarot cards that set her on a dark path. O'Donoghue expertly blurs the lines between the real and the unreal as readers are swept up in Maeve's journey to undo the wrongs she thoughtlessly causes, from causing the disappearance of her former best friend to unintentionally empowering the cultish leader of a conservative youth group that promotes hate speech and cruelty. With a deft hand, O'Donoghue crafts a narrative that is steeped in both classic gothic atmosphere and contemporary representation: Maeve, who is white, grapples with her privilege against the backdrop of the paranormal as she considers the ways in which Roe, her nonbinary love interest; Fiona, her Filipina friend; Jo, her queer sister; and Lily, her former BFF with hearing loss have to navigate the complex and sometimes hostile landscape of modern Ireland. Stefanie Caponi's tarot card illustrations are hauntingly perfect companions to the text. Much like the novel, the cards appear deceptively familiar at first glance. The stakes are high, the narrative is nuanced, and the climax and resolution are refreshingly unexpected. VERDICT Expect readers to fall into this blurred tale of the normal and the paranormal.—Jen McConnel, Queen's Univ., Ont.