A deeply flawed story of hidden history literally buried within a small white town.
A haunted house helps Sydney make friends in a new community.
Eighth grader Sydney Mackenzie, a white girl, arrives home from school one day to the horrifying news that her parents have decided to move across the country to Delaware. She is forced to leave her life in LA so that her parents can run a recently inherited family-owned cemetery business. After a cross-country drive, her family finally arrives in the small town of Buttermilk River Cove, population 800. Their home is something out of a scary movie: an old, weathered Victorian, with cemetery plots serving as the front lawn. Sydney decides she must do her best to communicate her California cool to the kids at her new school. She quickly learns that the local kids couldn’t care less about her being from California and are more intrigued about her living at the town cemetery. After admitting to some new friends that she believes her house is haunted, Sydney has a séance to investigate. What comes next is an unveiling of a deeper story about the Underground Railroad. Callaghan creates two stories; what at first seems to be a “new city-girl in a small town” story slowly slips from Sydney’s desperation to make friends into the haunting tale of the ghost of an enslaved girl that seems to communicate with Sydney. The story’s ending feels more than a bit contrived, stumbling badly with a tragic attempt at humor that makes a mockery of slavery and undermines what is mostly a solid book.
A deeply flawed story of hidden history literally buried within a small white town. (author’s note, recipes) (Mystery. 9-13)Pub Date: March 7, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-4814-6569-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Aladdin
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Rich and strange (and kitted out with an eye-catching cover), but stronger in the set pieces than the internal logic.
Chainani works an elaborate sea change akin to Gregory Maguire’s Wicked (1995), though he leaves the waters muddied.
Every four years, two children, one regarded as particularly nice and the other particularly nasty, are snatched from the village of Gavaldon by the shadowy School Master to attend the divided titular school. Those who survive to graduate become major or minor characters in fairy tales. When it happens to sweet, Disney princess–like Sophie and her friend Agatha, plain of features, sour of disposition and low of self-esteem, they are both horrified to discover that they’ve been dropped not where they expect but at Evil and at Good respectively. Gradually—too gradually, as the author strings out hundreds of pages of Hogwarts-style pranks, classroom mishaps and competitions both academic and romantic—it becomes clear that the placement wasn’t a mistake at all. Growing into their true natures amid revelations and marked physical changes, the two spark escalating rivalry between the wings of the school. This leads up to a vicious climactic fight that sees Good and Evil repeatedly switching sides. At this point, readers are likely to feel suddenly left behind, as, thanks to summary deus ex machina resolutions, everything turns out swell(ish).
Rich and strange (and kitted out with an eye-catching cover), but stronger in the set pieces than the internal logic. (Fantasy. 11-13)Pub Date: May 14, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-06-210489-2
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Feb. 12, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2013
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