Have You Read This? The Bone Weaver's Orchard by Sarah Read

Fans of Harry Potter, as well as many young adult and juvenile books, may be familiar with the trope dealing with the transformative power of a new school/new environment. After living with his aunt and uncle who treat him like an afterthought at best and like a whipped dog at worst, Harry is whisked off to Hogwarts where he finds fame, friendship, and perhaps more importantly, acceptance. But Charley Wilson finds something altogether different in Sarah Read's The Bone Weaver's Orchard when he is sent off to school.
With his mother dead and his father serving in the military, Charley is sent to the Old Cross School for Boys. While Harry Potter enters Hogwarts a celebrity thanks to being "The Boy Who Lived," Charley enters the school as a boy struggling to find a place away from his family. He is able to confide in people like gardener Sam Forster and and motherly Matron Grace, but Charly is still regarded as a troublemaker by many of his teachers and fellow classmates. What purpose he does find begins when a potential friend winds up missing, leading Charley on a mystery involving dark, crumbling corridors, Gothic ruins, and ghastly secrets.
As I read this book, after I tried to stop comparing it to Harry Potter, it reminded me of Disney movies during the 70's and 80's that, before the animated era of talking crabs and blue genies, made live-action movies that terrified a generation. The book started out as something that could have been in the juvenile section of the library, particularly with the child protagonist struggling to solve a mystery that many of his peers and authority figures tell him to ignore. It soon became something genuinely frightening as the school does have some very dark and disturbing secrets, as violent and terrifying as anything dreamed up by Mary Shelley or Clive Barker. Once again going back to the Harry Potter analogy, Sarah Read offers up some real literary magic to combine so many influences from both children's and adult literature to create the story of a plucky, young hero who, while dealing with his own traumas, tries to survive what is waiting out in the burned, dilapidated halls of Old Cross, thus creating a book that serves as the perfect bridge for young adult horror readers who are looking for a genuinely terrifying and disturbing experience.