La Malédiction

My journey into French-ness continues with Sonia K. LaFlamme's La Malédiction, the other French teen novel I picked up at the Toronto Reference Library sale. It's also about ghosts, though more in a haunted house vein than Le crime de Culdéric. The book tells the story of a 14-year-old girl named Juliana, whose father lusts after a mansion owned (but not lived in) by Juliana's grand-mother, Joséphine. Joséphine believes the mansion is cursed and doesn't want it to fall into her son's hands when she dies, so she draws up a will to leave the house to the government--but on the very night she croaks, her son finds the will and destroys it. Soon after, Juliana and her family move into the long-abandoned house. That covers the first few chapters and the book starts off with a good premise, but it simply gets kinda boring after that. Nothing really scary happens in the "cursed" house--instead the reader suffers through a long flashback of what happened to Juliana's grand-mother that caused the curse in the first place (and it's not a particularly original cause either). The one good thing I'll say about the book is the cover art, with that creepy ghost in the background.