A good choice for middle-grade readers looking for something smart and scary.
Thirteen short stories to creep out kids.
Fans of Scary Stories To Tell in the Dark looking for a modern spin will find exactly what they want in this offering. Typical trials and tribulations in children’s lives are twisted toward the uncanny, as when a popcorn kernel lodged between Jamie’s teeth turns into a mouthful of twisted fangs with minds of their own. Or when a paper airplane accidentally cuts a hole in reality. Hughes’moody black-and-white illustrations highlight disturbing moments in each story, drawing easy parallels to Stephen Gammell’s nightmare-inducing artwork that accompanies Alvin Schwartz’s classic. Each story is between 10 and 20 pages, making the volume easy to put down at bedtime or pick up in the light of day, though this brevity means that characterization and emotional depth are sacrificed in exchange for action and chills. None of the characters are explicitly racialized, implying the white default, and all of the scenarios feel firmly and nondescriptly middle-class. Readers will get an additional thrill when they realize that many of these stories don’t have endings, and they may find themselves looking askance at the next stray cat or grumpy bus driver.
A good choice for middle-grade readers looking for something smart and scary. (Horror. 8-13)Pub Date: Sept. 3, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-4598-2079-1
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Orca
Review Posted Online: May 7, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2019
Tenderly resonant and memorable.
Ferris finds herself in the midst of several love stories during the summer before fifth grade.
Emma Phineas Wilkey’s moniker comes from the circumstances of her birth: under the Ferris wheel at the fairground. Her contained world, centered around her family and best friend, is filled with kindness, humor, and singular personalities, while the indeterminate late-20th-century small-town setting feels like a safe place from which to observe heartbreak and loss. Ferris’ architect father and her pragmatic mother, on break from teaching high school math, anchor her home life, along with Pinky, her hilariously ferocious 6-year-old sister, and Charisse, her grandmother, who claims to have seen an unhappy ghost in their big old house. Ferris’ best friend, Billy Jackson, whom she’s loved since kindergarten, hears the music of the world: “The whole world is singing all the time.” Ferris, serious and sensitive, is attuned to the ways that the vocabulary words they learned in Mrs. Mielk’s fourth grade class describe moments in her life. DiCamillo’s gift for conveying an entire person and world in a few brushstrokes of storytelling provides depth and quiet magic to this account of an eventful summer in which a ghost is appeased, an outlaw (Pinky) is somewhat reformed, and an uncle and aunt are reconciled. Ferris experiences two surprising moments of transcendence and becomes aware of the ways love suffuses everything. Characters are cued white.
Tenderly resonant and memorable. (Fiction. 8-12)Pub Date: March 5, 2024
ISBN: 9781536231052
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Candlewick
Review Posted Online: Dec. 6, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2024
Supernatural mystery meets generational drama with hopeful endings for all.
Eleven-year-old Frank must solve a supernatural mystery to save his new home.
As fifth grade comes to an end, Frank Fernández is looking forward to finally staying put in Alabama for a second year, as promised, after a childhood spent following his parents’ home renovation work all across the country. Frequent relocation has made Frank wary of forming friendships or making plans, but his hopes for more stability are temporarily dashed when his parents announce plans to renovate a lighthouse in the Florida Keys, near where his mother grew up and his father’s home country of Cuba. Papi promises this will be their last move, though: The lighthouse will be theirs. But from their first day on Spectacle Key, things seem to go wrong: Tensions rise between his parents, and Frank’s hopes of a forever home are under threat from seemingly supernatural forces. In order to put down roots, Frank and new ghostly friend Connie, a White girl with freckles, must discover what secrets the island is hiding, uncovering Frank’s own family roots along the way. Frank is a fan of horror—he names his new Great Dane puppy Mary Shelley. But though there is some mild peril to be found, rather than a ghostly thriller, this is an appealing, lightly spooky family drama with valuable lessons for those who would hide from a difficult past instead of confronting and healing generational trauma.
Supernatural mystery meets generational drama with hopeful endings for all. (Supernatural. 8-12)Pub Date: Sept. 6, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-06-313481-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Balzer + Bray/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 12, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2022
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