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The Haunting Summary

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The Haunting by Joan Lowery Nixon is a mystery novel about how a teenage girl learns about the brave women in her family who did not even go near their famous haunted plantation, Graymoss. Fifteen year old Lia Starling just received the message that her great grandmother is giving her mother Anne, the property of Graymoss plantation. It has been kept in good care since Charlotte Blevin’s, (Lia’s great, great, great grandmother) grandfather died during the Civil War. Her parents dreamed of having a large family with a dozen unadopted children. But her parents refuse to listen to anyone about the evil spirits that haunts Graymoss. Lia gives her all to find out who or what the spirits wants even when she is scared to death. In the end, she solves …show more content…

Plot contains flashbacks, conflicts, foreshadowing, and a resolution or denouement. Again, Lia shows ambition throughout the plot in varies ways to solve problems to get the Graymoss evil spirit vanquishes. In the plot with this novel I first read about a flashback to when Lia read her great great great grandmother Charlotte’s diary, to understand how Graymoss became haunted. “When Grandfather isn’t nearby Mr. Slade is mean to the workers” (Nixon pg 25). When Lia reads this in her diary, she is immediately shocked that he has done that but Charlotte’s grandfather need help. With this information that Lia received from Charlotte in her diary, she can further long her invagitation into Graymoss.The next step in plot in this story is the conflicts between Lia and her mother with Graymoss. Her mother, Anne, wants to make Graymoss into a big family with adopted kids but Lia does not want it to happen because of the evil spirits. [Lia says “A big family in a haunted house,” as well as her mother saying, “ ... Charlotte’s writings found a receptive audience in you. You want the house to be unlivable.” Lia says, “No, I don’t. Well, yes, I do. I mean--”] (Nixon pg 46). Lia and her mother go back and forth with having extra kids in the haunt Graymoss. At about three fours in, Lia changed her mind and seen the point of her mom’s view to save Graymoss. In spite of the conflicts in this book, there is also one very good …show more content…

Characterization include how the author general reveals the character’s personality. One of Lia’s qualities she developed was the ambition to continue forward to achieve in Graymoss’s purification. Even though her parents did not believe in ghost, she kept wanting to prove how brave she was and to actual figure out the mystery to bestow away the evil spirit of Mr. Slade. “But I didn’t laugh. I’d just given myself the job of getting rid of whoever was haunting Graymoss, and I didn’t know how I was going to do it” (Nixon pg 135). She took what was given to her by words for mostly everyone including her parents into action by planning and taking specific steps to achieve her goal. Eventually before you could complete her task in hand, she got scary and was about to leave Graymoss. The suspense that the reader experience was about the same as Lia felt when the voices and cold chills gets her. “The wind pushed against her, like it was guiding her to the right direction but the voices all around kept bugging her and was about to drive her mad enough to escape to her real world. You can’t stop me. Lia said with her running to the basement door with all her force to open it” (Nixon pg 181). With including some additional information to sum up what Lia was doing, she obviously didn’t stop and tried to make herself big and using distractions to

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