Grave Message

Jaylin is a high school student in the midst of studying for exams. She becomes distracted from studying, however, when she begins to receive texts from her best friend Fatima, a best friend who has been dead for exactly one year. Jaylin can’t decide if she’s just being over-imaginative due to exam stress or if someone is playing a very nasty joke on her. Then the ghostly Fatima gives Jaylin an ultimatum: she must solve the mystery of Fatima’s death and let people know what really happened that night.

Grave Message is an “Orca Anchor” young adult novel, a series whose target audience consists of teens who have lower reading skills than their peers. This title is rated at a 1.9 reading level and consists of only 66 pages. Thus, there is little room for developing characters or settings to any great extent. Jaylin appears to be an ordinary teen, worried about exams and concerned that her boyfriend shows interest in someone else.

The book is necessarily focused on the plot, and Mary Jennifer Payne gives her readers an edge-of-the-seat experience as Jaylin goes beyond her comfort level in order to solve the mystery of Fatima’s death. The texts from beyond the grave contain information and photos only Fatima could have and lead Jaylin step-by-step towards the truth. At one point, she encounters an odd homeless man who frightens her. Later, Jaylin learns what friend Ann contributed to Fatima’s eventual death, and finally Jaylin pushes herself to visit Lisa, whose husband is in jail for causing the accident which killed Fatima. All of these encounters add to the excitement and tension as readers wonder what really happened.

High interest, low vocab novels fill an important gap and provide less able readers with great books which will hopefully lead them to reading success and an interest in expanding their reading horizons. Payne uses surefire ingredients to come up with a terrific story, blending the theme of grief and bereavement with the excitement of the supernatural and murder mystery genres.