From the bestselling author of Dark and Shallow Lies comes a moody and atmospheric paranormal thriller about a seventeen-year-old girl returning to an exclusive theater camp to uncover the truth of what really happened there twelve years ago, the night her mother drowned.
SECRETS SO DEEP
by Ginny Myers Sain
Razorbill/Penguin BYR, September 2022
(via Park & Fine Literary)
Twelve years ago, Avril’s mother drowned at Whisper Cove theater, just off the rocky Connecticut coastline. It was ruled an accident, but Avril’s never been totally convinced. Local legend claims that the women in the waves—ghosts from old whaling stories—called her mother into the ocean with their whispering. Because, as they say at Whisper Cove, what the sea wants, the sea will have.
While Avril doesn’t believe in ghosts, she knows there are lots of different ways for places, and people, to be haunted. She’s spent the past twelve years trying to make sense of the strange bits and pieces she does remember from the night she lost her mother. Stars falling into the sea. A blinding light. A tight grip on her wrist. The odd sensation of flying. Now, at seventeen, she’s returning to Whisper Cove for the first time, and she might finally unravel the mystery of what really happened.
As Avril becomes more involved with camp director Willa and her mysterious son Cole, Whisper Cove reveals itself to her. Distances seem to shift in the strange fog. Echoes of long-past moments bounce off the marsh. And Avril keeps meeting herself—and her dead mother—late at night, at the edge of the ocean.
The truth Avril seeks is ready to be discovered. But it will come at a terrible cost.
Ginny Myers Sain lives in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and has spent the past twenty years working closely with teens as a director and acting instructor in a program designed for high school students seriously intent on pursuing a career in the professional theatre. Having grown up in deeply rural America, she is interested in telling stories about resilient kids who come of age in remote settings. Her debut novel Dark and Shallow Lies was published by Razorbill in 2021.
Nova Albright, the first Black homecoming queen at Lovett High, is dead. Murdered the night of her coronation, her body found the next morning in the old slave cemetery she spent her weekends rehabilitating. 
Whistler, Indiana has suffered more than its fair share of misfortunes—everything from sudden drownings to poisoning conspiracies to unsolved disappearances. And almost every bad thing can be traced back to the Clark family. Some people even believe they are cursed. But instead of cowering from her family’s past, Roxie Clark is fascinated by it. Combining her flare for performance with her obsession with all things horror, she’s woven her ancestors’ history into a lucrative ghost tour that has quickly become infamous all over the state.
Liv Reese wakes up in the back of a taxi with no idea where she is or how she got there. When she’s dropped off at the door of her brownstone, a stranger answers—a stranger who now lives in her apartment and forces her out in the cold. She reaches for her phone to call for help, only to discover it’s missing, and in its place is a bloodstained knife. That’s when she sees that her hands are covered in black pen, scribbled messages like graffiti on her skin: STAY AWAKE.
Childhood friends Amalia, Josef, Gero and Bodo are on a summer canoeing trip. However, the moment they arrive at their destination it’s clear that they aren’t welcome. Josef in particular, who is black, senses the locals’ discomfort in his presence. They evidently deeply dislike anything that looks remotely foreign. But should the friends let themselves be intimidated by a few backward provincials? Should they simply give in? Amalia, Josef, Gero and Bodo are determined to stay, and from that moment on there’s no turning back. Every step they take leads them closer to the abyss. They all know that this trip won’t end well, but none of them wants to admit it. Soon their summer adventure becomes a desperate effort to get out of this place alive.