A draw for veterans and newcomers alike.
October Schwartz and her five dead co-conspirators are back again to solve a double mystery tied to the unsavory history of Stickville, Ontario, in this fourth installment from Munday.
For this most recent round of resurrection, October and the dead kids plan to investigate the death of their own Tabetha Scott, a black girl who died a few years after her escape from slavery, and its possible connection to the sinister Asphodel Meadows society. The mystery only deepens when a furtive pair is seen making salt circles around children’s graves in the cemetery—circles the dead kids can’t pass through. As if her detective plate weren’t full enough, tensions skyrocket at school when $5,000 is stolen during the Band Warz competition, and the band accused of the crime asks October to clear their names. Munday’s narrative, mannered as ever with alternating narration and typeface changes, steers readers to consider systemic racism both as Tabetha slowly remembers her escape via the Underground Railroad and the discrimination she faced after arriving in Canada as well as the racist underpinnings of the frame job against the only nonwhite band at school arise. White guilt and angst over absolution—particularly October’s—is prioritized perhaps a touch too much, but a fairly elegant interweave of three mysteries that refuses to pull punches (historical or otherwise) regarding discrimination and with more than enough tantalizing intrigue and mortal danger to go around is enticing nonetheless.
A draw for veterans and newcomers alike. (Supernatural mystery. 12-15)Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-77041-333-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: ECW Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 13, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Chilling, difficult, and definitely not for readers without a solid understanding of the Holocaust despite the relatively...
A young boy grows up in Adolf Hitler’s mountain home in Austria.
Seven-year-old Pierrot Fischer and his frail French mother live in Paris. His German father, a bitter ex-soldier, returned to Germany and died there. Pierrot’s best friend is Anshel Bronstein, a deaf Jewish boy. After his mother dies, he lives in an orphanage, until his aunt Beatrix sends for him to join her at the Berghof mountain retreat in Austria, where she is housekeeper for Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun. It is here that he becomes ever more enthralled with Hitler and grows up, proudly wearing the uniform of the Hitler Youth, treating others with great disdain, basking in his self-importance, and then committing a terrible act of betrayal against his aunt. He witnesses vicious acts against Jews, and he hears firsthand of plans for extermination camps. Yet at war’s end he maintains that he was only a child and didn’t really understand. An epilogue has him returning to Paris, where he finds Anshel and begins a kind of catharsis. Boyne includes real Nazi leaders and historical details in his relentless depiction of Pierrot’s inevitable corruption and self-delusion. As with The Boy in the Striped Pajamas (2006), readers both need to know what Pierrot disingenuously doesn’t and are expected to accept his extreme naiveté, his total lack of awareness and comprehension in spite of what is right in front of him.
Chilling, difficult, and definitely not for readers without a solid understanding of the Holocaust despite the relatively simple reading level. (Historical fiction. 12-14)Pub Date: June 7, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-62779-030-7
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: March 29, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Enjoyably campy horror set in a small town with, plainly, dark secrets aplenty yet to discover.
Someone is systematically looting the town of Sticksville of its historical records in this third caper featuring punk teen detective October Schwartz and her five dead partners.
Break-ins at the museum and library are not only mysterious, but annoying, as they derail October’s efforts to dig into the late-18th-century history of a local family, a project that will both fulfil a school assignment and uncover how one of her ghostly young cohorts, Cyril Cooper, came to die. Moreover, October’s being stretched pretty thin. By day, she reluctantly tutors sharp-tongued frenemy Ashlie Salmons (aptly characterized as “Magneto to October Schwartz’s Professor X”) in math. By night, she sneaks out for investigations—which frequently involve clandestine entries, exploits such as digging up a corpse, and brushes with both police and violent death at the hands, or rather cutlass, of a glowing intruder in classic pirate garb—there’s hardly time to catch one’s breath, much less sleep. The intrusive narrator laces the episode with references to bands and other pop-culture icons that are collected, for less with-it readers, in a massive annotated appendix, and the book is decorated with occasional dark-lined vignettes. Alternating chapters switch typefaces and narrative form as the tale sweeps its terrified but stubborn protagonist through a series of narrowly averted threats to life and reputation alike on the way to a shocking denouement that further thickens an ongoing plotline.
Enjoyably campy horror set in a small town with, plainly, dark secrets aplenty yet to discover. (Mystery/fantasy. 12-15)Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-77041-074-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: ECW Press
Review Posted Online: June 28, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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