“A clever, cobwebby YA mystery that brings Edgar Allan Poe’s ghost to life – atmospheric, puzzle-packed, and genuinely spooky.”
Diana Peterfreund’s Ellen Poe: The Forgotten Lore is a book that doesn’t just tell you a spooky story but has a knack for pulling you into its damp, cobwebby atmosphere. It’s the sensation of dust in the air, the smell of old paper in a sunless room, the kind of quiet that makes the back of your neck feel watched.
The premise is immediately intriguing: sixteen-year-old Ellen Poe Reynolds, a girl saddled with a name and a family legend claiming descent from Edgar Allan Poe, moves into her aunt’s struggling, Poe-themed Baltimore bed-and-breakfast. Almost immediately, her lifelong nightmares start bleeding into her waking hours. She discovers a cryptic journal, and then she starts seeing him, the ghost of Poe himself, offering cryptic advice and quoting his own macabre works. What unfolds is a race to decode puzzles and cyphers, understand a terrifying psychic inheritance, and maybe even save her aunt’s home.
Peterfreund’s greatest strength here is the atmosphere. She builds Raven’s Rest, the B&B, into a character itself—a place packed with Gothic kitsch and genuine, unsettling history. It’s the perfect setting for a mystery that balances the “cozy and the creepy,” as one blurb accurately notes. The integration of Poe’s history and literary works isn’t just name-dropping. Peterfreund has clearly done her homework, weaving in details about his life, his obsession with codes, and the unresolved mysteries of his death to form the backbone of the plot. For fans of the author, it’s a fascinating deep cut. For newcomers, it’s a compelling introduction.
Ellen herself is a sharply-drawn protagonist. She’s intelligent and resourceful but also realistically vulnerable, grappling with family financial stress and the sheer terror of her unwanted abilities. Her budding partnership with Gus, the new boy at school who has a ghostly connection of his own, feels organic. It offers light romance and a solid friendship built on shared secrets rather than instant attraction.
The mystery’s engine, powered by cyphers and cryptograms, is undeniably fun. It creates an interactive reading experience that will appeal to fans of escape rooms or puzzle-based narratives. The story moves at a good clip, with Ellen and Gus following clues that lead them from libraries to museums, uncovering a “sinister underground scavenger hunt tied to Poe’s secret history”. Peterfreund’s writing in these sections is precise and engaging, making the act of solving feel accessible and thrilling.
The book shoulders a lot. It’s establishing a series, introducing Ellen’s powers, exploring Poe’s ghost, developing a mystery, and hint at larger familial secrets (like the unresolved subplot concerning Ellen’s father). At times, this can make the central plot feel slightly overburdened. Some secondary characters, like Gus’s sister Madeline, don’t get as much room to develop beyond their function in the plot. The ending, while resolving the immediate puzzle, consciously leaves several threads dangling for future installments, which might frustrate readers preferring a fully-contained story.
Peterfreund’s writing style in this novel is a specific and effective instrument. Reading her prose in Ellen Poe feels like carefully unwrapping a series of nested puzzle boxes. The outer layer is clean, contemporary, and witty, Ellen’s voice. Peel that back, and you find the intricate, ornate craftsmanship of the historical mystery, all coded letters and archaic clues. Inside that lies the dark, psychological core: the fear of madness, the weight of legacy, and the chill of the supernatural. She manages these shifts in tone seamlessly, moving from a sarcastic quip about a stuffed raven in her bedroom to a genuinely eerie description of Poe’s ghostly apparition without breaking the narrative spell.
She avoids the overly florid language that sometimes bogs down Gothic fiction. Instead, her descriptions are sharp and sensory. You feel the dust in the abandoned attic, hear the particular quiet of a museum after hours, sense the oppressive atmosphere of the B&B’s themed rooms. This clarity makes the supernatural elements, when they occur, all the more jarring and effective. Her dialogue, especially the archaic, riddling speech of Poe’s ghost, is a highlight, walking a fine line between melodrama and genuine poetic menace.
The YA landscape is perpetually crowded with supernatural tales, but Ellen Poe: The Forgotten Lore carves out a distinct niche. It arrives at a time when smart, mystery-driven series like Maureen Johnson’s Truly Devious (whose author provided a blurb for the book) have proven there’s a hungry audience for intellectual thrills. Peterfreund’s novel sits comfortably alongside these but brings a unique historical-literary flavour.
It’s more than a ghost story; it’s a gateway to literary history. In an educational climate where classic authors can sometimes feel remote to younger readers, this book performs a neat trick. It makes Edgar Allan Poe relevant, not as a stodgy figure from a textbook, but as a complex, flawed, and fascinating character in his own right, a man obsessed with puzzles, plagued by spirits, and perfect for a modern mystery. The School Library Journal called it “delightful and spooky” and drew a comparison to the Netflix show Wednesday, pinpointing its appeal to the current appetite for the morbidly clever.
The book also stands out by being genuinely scary in parts without relying on graphic violence. Its horror is psychological and atmospheric, rooted in the fear of losing one’s mind and the unsettling idea of being haunted by one’s own blood. It proves that a YA novel can be sophisticated, respectful of its audience’s intelligence, and still be a blast to read. It’s the kind of book that might spark a newfound interest in The Raven or a dive into the history of cryptograms, and that secondary impact is not insignificant.
Peterfreund has built a world where the past is very much alive, and dangerously so. She leaves you with Ellen, standing at the threshold of a much larger mystery, with the ghost of a poet for a guide and a head full of unsettling questions. The final, lingering thought the book leaves you with isn’t about a jump scare, but a quieter, more persistent unease: when your family legacy is a descent into darkness, how do you walk your own path without being swallowed by the shadows? What do we do when the ghosts we inherit refuse to stay buried?
If you’re a fan of smart, puzzle-driven mysteries with a gothic twist, I cannot recommend Ellen Poe: The Forgotten Lore enough. It’s a thoroughly enjoyable read that I think will leave you eagerly awaiting the next book in the series, as it has me
Ellen Poe: The Forgotten Lore by Diana Peterfreund
The first book in an exciting YA series about a teen girl, descended from Edgar Allan Poe, who must navigate the haunting legacy of her ancestor while learning to harness her own strength and intelligence, especially as she begins to commune with the dead.What happens when your tell-tale nightmares turn into reality and the ghost of Edgar Allan Poe won’t seem to let you alone?
For as long as she can remember, sixteen-year-old Ellen Poe’s family has claimed to be long-lost descendants of Edgar Allan Poe. But when she moves in with her aunt in a Poe-themed B&B, the nightmares that have always haunted her begin bleeding into Ellen’s waking hours.
When she stumbles upon a journal in the house, none other than Edgar Allan Poe himself begins visiting her. Has the journal somehow released his ghost? And what does he want with Ellen? Through secret messages in his writings, she learns that the two share the same psychic ability to interact with spirits–which is what ultimately drove him mad.
This thrilling new series for young adult readers follows Ellen on her quest to learn more about her abilities, the afterlife, and the clues Poe has left for her (ciphers and cryptograms galore), in an effort to not suffer his same fate.
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