Chasing Ghosts

There are two stories to Nicola Pierce’s Chasing Ghosts and at first sight they don’t appear to link together very much at all. One describes Sir John Franklin’s doomed expedition to the Arctic, the journey mostly seen through the eyes of his second-in command, Francis Crozier. The second story is also a first person narrative in which young Ann Coppin describes the goings-on in her Derry family home following the death of her little sister Louisa, known to all as Weesy.

Both are ghost stories: readers discover the fate that befell Franklin’s expedition, how his two ships were trapped in ice for months until in desperation Crozier led the crew out to find help, only for them all to perish. Crozier’s voice is that of a dead man, while thousands of miles away in Derry, Weesy is haunting her family, and sister and brother in particular, mischievous and sometimes malevolent. The two narrative strands are equally vivid and gripping, and Pierce instils both with a matching sense of the totally prosaic (details of daily life) and the truly uncanny (the strangeness of Franklin and his crew recreating the setting of an upper-class Victorian home in the middle of an icy nowhere is constantly shocking; Weesy’s appearances genuinely creepy). The despair and physical agony experienced by Crozier chimes too with the tension and grief of the Coppins and Ann’s frustration at the limits set by on her by her parents, though readers may still find themselves waiting impatiently for the two stories to come together.

All is finally made clear towards the end of the book. During a séance, set up by her mother, Ann asks Weesy if she knows the whereabouts of Sir John’s two ships, missing now for five years. In a trance, Ann draws what could be a map of their location. End notes by the author explain that the Coppins’ story is also true and that Ann’s/Weesy’s map proved remarkably accurate.

Pierce has a gift for putting young readers at the heart of important moments in history in books including City of Fate and Behind the Walls. While filled with the same inspiring sense of real life events, this seems also to be asking questions about truth, perception and the stories we want to believe.