Solid scares elevated by psychological richness.
Grieving sisters are hunted by haunted dolls.
Kaye, a sensitive girl from Brooklyn who’s in therapy for arithmomania (a compulsion to count) as well as other anxious symptoms such as intrusive thoughts and catastrophizing, is spending the summer in upstate New York with her family at her recently deceased grandfather’s house. Grief has left her struggling and hardly speaking. At the local Cheese Festival, Kaye and younger sister Holly encounter a strange man who calls himself the Poppet Maker. He engages them with games like cards and a cup and ring, and Holly wins an exquisite doll. The man calls it Holly-doll—and it does look just like Holly, who’s delighted by what the Poppet Maker claims is a coincidence. Kaye feels sure something is wrong. Holly-doll soon guides Holly to unearth an ever-increasing number of creepy dolls that Kaye sees moving on their own—unless it’s her imagination? Unable to turn for help to skeptical adults, like her grieving mom and uncle or her therapist, Dr. Shanti, Kaye confides in her new friend and crush, Joey, a local girl. The dolls’ increasing aggression creates wonderful (and non-gory) scares. Some of the solutions to the mysteries feel a bit spoon-fed (for example, answers revealed through a discovered diary and a villain’s flashback), and other intriguing questions are never answered. But the climax gives young readers a blood-free taste of body horror, and a final stinger keeps the chills alive. The characters largely present white.
Solid scares elevated by psychological richness. (Horror. 8-12)Pub Date: Sept. 30, 2025
ISBN: 9780063355194
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 19, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Fast-paced and plot-driven.
In his latest, prolific author Gratz takes on Hitler’s Olympic Games.
When 13-year-old American gymnast Evie Harris arrives in Berlin to compete in the 1936 Olympic Games, she has one goal: stardom. If she can bring home a gold medal like her friend, the famous equestrian-turned-Hollywood-star Mary Brooks, she might be able to lift her family out of their Dust Bowl poverty. But someone slips a strange note under Evie’s door, and soon she’s dodging Heinz Fischer, the Hitler Youth member assigned to host her, and meeting strangers who want to make use of her gymnastic skills—to rob a bank. As the games progress, Evie begins to see the moral issues behind their sparkling facade—the antisemitism and racism inherent in Nazi ideology and the way Hitler is using the competition to support and promote these beliefs. And she also agrees to rob the bank. Gratz goes big on the Mission Impossible–style heist, which takes center stage over the actual competitions, other than Jesse Owens’ famous long jump. A lengthy and detailed author’s note provides valuable historical context, including places where Gratz adapted the facts for storytelling purposes (although there’s no mention of the fact that before 1952, Olympic equestrian sports were limited to male military officers). With an emphasis on the plot, many of the characters feel defined primarily by how they’re suffering under the Nazis, such as the fictional diver Ursula Diop, who was involuntarily sterilized for being biracial.
Fast-paced and plot-driven. (Historical fiction. 9-12)Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2025
ISBN: 9781338736106
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Scholastic
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2025
The three way chats, in which they are joined by other animals, about web spinning, themselves, other humans—are as often...
A successful juvenile by the beloved New Yorker writer portrays a farm episode with an imaginative twist that makes a poignant, humorous story of a pig, a spider and a little girl.
Young Fern Arable pleads for the life of runt piglet Wilbur and gets her father to sell him to a neighbor, Mr. Zuckerman. Daily, Fern visits the Zuckermans to sit and muse with Wilbur and with the clever pen spider Charlotte, who befriends him when he is lonely and downcast. At the news of Wilbur's forthcoming slaughter, campaigning Charlotte, to the astonishment of people for miles around, spins words in her web. "Some Pig" comes first. Then "Terrific"—then "Radiant". The last word, when Wilbur is about to win a show prize and Charlotte is about to die from building her egg sac, is "Humble". And as the wonderful Charlotte does die, the sadness is tempered by the promise of more spiders next spring.
The three way chats, in which they are joined by other animals, about web spinning, themselves, other humans—are as often informative as amusing, and the whole tenor of appealing wit and pathos will make fine entertainment for reading aloud, too.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 1952
ISBN: 978-0-06-026385-0
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1952
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
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