Book: Ghost in the Night
Author: Tiffany D. Jackson
Publisher: Scholastic Press
Year: 2026
Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

Synopsis : “Harmony Roundtree is obsessed with ghosts. She’s not entirely sure they’re real, but she has her suspicions. When visiting Savannah, Georgia – known as the most haunted city in America – Harmony goes on a ghost tour…and she sees something that night, in the window of an abandoned house. Was it a ghost? Or a trick of the light? With two new friends, Harmony sets out to investigate…and stumbles upon shocking clues that lead to an unsolved murder.”

Review : This is my third middle grade ARC from Scholastic Press in the last two years and I’m beginning to notice a theme. The first two, books 1 and 2 in The Last Resort series, follow a young girl navigating the death of her grandfather while investigating a series of ghostly apparitions while she’s out of town. In Ghost in the Night, a completely different book unrelated to the aforementioned series, we find Harmony, a 12-year-old, navigating the death of her grandmother while investigating a ghostly apparition while she’s out of town. It’s a striking resemblance to the structure and framework of an entirely different book written by totally different people. I took issue with The Last Resort series when the kids were normalized meeting up with a stranger they’d been speaking to online and once again I find myself taking issue with Ghost in the Night for similar reasons. While Harmony and her friends do not actively speak to strangers online and then go out into the real world to meet those strangers (as we see happen in The Last Resort), Harmony and her 10-year-old companion Robby do indeed seek out an adult male online and find him in person. When it all goes down, Jackson even goes so far as to write in a little internal conversation that this is basically a walking advertisement for meeting strangers from the internet. I’m getting really tired of reading about little kids meeting strangers from the internet, particularly adult men. I think middle grade authors can do a hell of a lot better than that. Kids deserve better than that.

I think it’s a worthwhile device to navigate death and grief in a kid’s book by introducing ghosts, but it’s beginning to feel a bit done already, especially coming from the same publishing house less than a year apart from each other. I want Scholastic Press to do better, to push for different storylines, and to try a little harder. I think they did Jackson dirty by publishing this story right on top of another series that’s doing the exact same thing with the same time frame. It’s worth noting that while the structure of the story was the same, the contents were different, but not different enough that I wasn’t thinking back to the other series throughout.

Ghost in the Night was a quick read with a heartwarming found family trope nestled within, but it was also wrapped up in a lot of fear mongering around ghosts, which felt like a slightly off-kilter take in a book about ghost hunting. It was just fine, but like I mentioned, it has already been done, and kids seeking out adults they met online will absolutely never sit right with me. There were aspects of the story that were left dangling, but not in a way that leads me to believe there will be a follow-up book, more so in the way that leads me to feel that they were accidentally left loose.

Advice : Once again, I have to caution parents to do their research with these Scholastic Press books. If you aren’t interested in your kids reading about how to find adult men online and then meet up with them in the real world, I can’t in good conscience recommend this book to you.