Modern themes and old-fashioned values in a ghostly Nantucket wonder, with a twist.
Nantucket’s ghosts work alongside living islanders to face the challenge of development that guts old houses.
One year after a tragic boating accident, the ghost of Mary Chase, dead over 100 years, wakes in a windless, 21st-century November. She’s the new Town Crier, needed to warn others about the imminent destruction of her 18th-century house, one of many being “rehabilitated” for new, off-island owners. She watches the Old North Gang—Gabe Pinkham and Paul, Cyrus, and Maddie Coffin, all white island children of mostly English descent; biracial Phoebe Folger Antoine, whose mom is white and whose dad is Jamaican; and Dominican–Cape Verdean twins Maria and Markos Ramos—as they encounter ghosts from an earlier time and begin to work with them to thwart the developers through a string of “accidents.” And, at a crucial moment, when Phee’s house is threatened, once-quiet Mary finds her voice, screaming to wake the world. The author of such well-loved, intricately plotted mysteries as Chasing Vermeer (2004), Balliett outdoes herself here with this surprising story, set in a lovingly depicted present-day Nantucket and peopled with ordinary citizens who, like their predecessors, work with their hands. Phee and her grandfather have even started an organization to help homeless island workers. Mary’s first-person, present-tense account weaves in and out of an omniscient observation of the children’s actions as the line blurs between the living and the dead.
Modern themes and old-fashioned values in a ghostly Nantucket wonder, with a twist. (Fantasy. 9-13)Pub Date: March 27, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-545-86756-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Scholastic
Review Posted Online: Nov. 21, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2017
Full of puzzles to think about, puns to groan at and references to children’s book titles, this solid, tightly plotted read...
When a lock-in becomes a reality game, 12-year-old Kyle Keeley and his friends use library resources to find their way out of Alexandriaville’s new public library.
The author of numerous mysteries for children and adults turns his hand to a puzzle adventure with great success. Starting with the premise that billionaire game-maker Luigi Lemoncello has donated a fortune to building a library in a town that went without for 12 years, Grabenstein cleverly uses the tools of board and video games—hints and tricks and escape hatches—to enhance this intricate and suspenseful story. Twelve 12-year-old winners of an essay contest get to be the first to see the new facility and, as a bonus, to play his new escape game. Lemoncello’s gratitude to the library of his childhood extends to providing a helpful holographic image of his 1968 librarian, but his modern version also includes changing video screens, touch-screen computers in the reading desks and an Electronic Learning Center as well as floor-to-ceiling bookshelves stretching up three stories. Although the characters, from gamer Kyle to schemer Charles Chiltington, are lightly developed, the benefits of pooling strengths to work together are clear.
Full of puzzles to think about, puns to groan at and references to children’s book titles, this solid, tightly plotted read is a winner for readers and game-players alike. (Mystery. 9-13)Pub Date: June 25, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-375-87089-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: April 2, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2013
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Good Guys and Bad get just deserts in the end, and Stanley gets plenty of opportunities to display pluck and valor in this...
Sentenced to a brutal juvenile detention camp for a crime he didn't commit, a wimpy teenager turns four generations of bad family luck around in this sunburnt tale of courage, obsession, and buried treasure from Sachar (Wayside School Gets a Little Stranger, 1995, etc.).
Driven mad by the murder of her black beau, a schoolteacher turns on the once-friendly, verdant town of Green Lake, Texas, becomes feared bandit Kissin' Kate Barlow, and dies, laughing, without revealing where she buried her stash. A century of rainless years later, lake and town are memories—but, with the involuntary help of gangs of juvenile offenders, the last descendant of the last residents is still digging. Enter Stanley Yelnats IV, great-grandson of one of Kissin' Kate's victims and the latest to fall to the family curse of being in the wrong place at the wrong time; under the direction of The Warden, a woman with rattlesnake venom polish on her long nails, Stanley and each of his fellow inmates dig a hole a day in the rock-hard lake bed. Weeks of punishing labor later, Stanley digs up a clue, but is canny enough to conceal the information of which hole it came from. Through flashbacks, Sachar weaves a complex net of hidden relationships and well-timed revelations as he puts his slightly larger-than-life characters under a sun so punishing that readers will be reaching for water bottles.
Good Guys and Bad get just deserts in the end, and Stanley gets plenty of opportunities to display pluck and valor in this rugged, engrossing adventure. (Fiction. 9-13)Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 978-0-374-33265-5
Page Count: 233
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2000
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