The Wicked Deep by Shea Ernshaw (review)

For two hundred years, teen boys have regularly drowned in the waters surrounding the small seaside town of Sparrow, but not because of rough seas or riptides. The deaths occur when the ghosts of the Swan sisters, three girls who were named witches and killed, return in the month of June to inhabit the bodies of three local girls, lure boys into the harbor, and pull them under the water. Seventeen-year-old Penny Talbot hates what’s known as the Swan Season, which has become a macabre tourist attraction, and spends most of that month on the island she lives on with her frail mother, tending the lighthouse there. This year is different, however, as the locals get fired up, rounding up girls and accusing them of being one of the Swans. When Penny meets and falls for an outsider named Bo, she realizes she must protect him from the sisters and herself from the wrath of her neighbors. Shea zigs and zags along the familiar trajectory of a romance, hitting all the right notes but then throwing in new information that will make readers double back to see Penny and Bo’s relationship in a different, more complicated light. The atmosphere is made chilling both by the damp, briny streets of Sparrow and by its residents’ sudden fervor for vengeance, exchanging their usual resignation for the same violence that cursed the town years ago. Add a few heartbreaking surprises and a passionate act of sacrifice, and this becomes a haunting choice for those who appreciated Mabry’s All the Wind in the World (BCCB 10/17).