THE SPIDERWICK CHRONICLES, BOOK 1

Unexplained things are happening in the eerie Victorian heap that is new home to the Grace family. 

Rustlings in the decrepit walls lead the three children, to discover and destroy the nest of a Brownie and to locate, in Arthur Spiderwick’s secret library, his Field Guide to the Fantastical World, which details the habits of faeries. The infuriated Brownie exacts retribution in hateful ways: knotting Mallory’s long hair to her headboard and freezing animal-loving Simon’s tadpoles into ice cubes. The children mollify the Brownie by building him another home, but against his warnings that harm will result, keep the Field Guide. Book 2 (The Seeing Stone, 0-689-95937-6) steps up the peril: the unheeded warnings lead to Simon’s kidnapping by a roving gang of goblins. His siblings gain The Sight by means of a small stone lens (and efficacious goblin spit rubbed into the eyes) and succeed in rescuing him. Cleverly marketed as too dangerous to read, handsomely designed, and extravagantly illustrated this packs quite a punch. 

Readers who are too young to read Harry Potter independently will find these have just the right amount of menace laced with appealing humor and are blessed with crisp pacing and, of course, DiTerlizzi’s enticingly Gothic illustrations. (Fiction. 7-11)