Only mildly suspenseful, but between the mystery and familiar friendship problems, amusing enough to sustain interest.
Back for another outing after Vampires on the Run (2017), Quinnie and her young teen friends of Maiden Rock, Maine (a stereotypical middle-class village that tourists might imagine), get caught up in another mild mystery.
Quinnie’s BFF, Zoe, is back from two years in Scotland and is finding it hard to slip back into the old routine. Meanwhile Quinnie’s favorite boy buddy is just packing up to move back to New Jersey and new friend Ella is facing the challenge of finding her place with (or between) Zoe and Quinnie. On top of all that, a fancy chef has just opened a new restaurant in town that’s sure to provide competition for Quinnie’s father’s more modest but tried-and-true eatery, Gusty’s. With the newspaper’s Secret Diner set to pick a favorite between the two, someone begins to sabotage Gusty’s. Quinnie and her pals set out to discover the perpetrator using surveillance and good problem-solving skills, along with a bit of breaking and entering that gets them all in trouble. Plenty of red herrings will keep readers guessing until the climax. No one is described, but the white default probably prevails. An incomplete resolution of the gang’s immature relationship issues provides fodder for the next tale.
Only mildly suspenseful, but between the mystery and familiar friendship problems, amusing enough to sustain interest. (Mystery. 10-14)Pub Date: March 1, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5124-4836-8
Page Count: 280
Publisher: Carolrhoda
Review Posted Online: Dec. 2, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A fun, if messy, thriller that’s not afraid to go straight over the top.
A middle schooler must outrun a cadre of strange individuals while puzzling out the truth of what he is in this science-fiction offering.
Fourteen-year-old Noah Prime longs to live somewhere bigger than his small town of Arbuckle, Oregon, though he is happily involved in motocross—at least until he learns that the course is being torn down to make way for a condo development. This bad news coincides with some particularly strange happenings in Noah’s life, such as a literal (and very confusing) collision he has with Sahara, a girl that he comes to find very interesting. This is followed by his experiencing a brief and total paralysis while arguing with some bullies, which his friend Ogden, who is on the autism spectrum, insists is due to a psychological phenomenon called conversion disorder. The truth turns out to be much more complex, and it sends Noah, younger sister Andi, Ogden, and Sahara on a madcap quest involving aliens, time travel, an erupting volcano, and much more. The adventure is laced throughout with goofy, sarcastic humor, balancing the fantastical and somewhat confusing turns of events. While there is resolution at the story’s end, it also clearly sets the stage for a follow-up. The main characters read White by default.
A fun, if messy, thriller that’s not afraid to go straight over the top. (Science fiction. 10-14)Pub Date: April 11, 2023
ISBN: 978-0-7595-5524-2
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Jan. 24, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2023
Light on gore and corpses; otherwise a full-bore, uncomplicated shriekfest.
Does anyone who volunteers to spend a night in a derelict haunted hotel on a dare deserve what they get?
“The hotel is hungry. And we aren’t leaving here until it’s fed.” In what reads like a determined effort to check off every trope of the genre, Alexander sends new arrival Jasmine, along with two friends and several dozen other classmates, to the long-abandoned Carlisle Hotel for the annual seventh grade Dare—touching off a night of terror presided over by the leering, autocratic Grand Dame and complete with sudden gusts and blackouts, spectral visions, evil reflections in mirrors, skeletons, a giant spider, gravity reversals, tides of oily black sludge sucking screaming middle schoolers down the drain, and so much more. (No gore, though, aside from a few perfunctory drops of blood from one small scratch.) The author saves a twist for the end, and as inducement to read alone or aloud in the dark by flashlight, both his language and the typography crank up the melodrama: “He walks toward us, past the mirror, and I see it— / a pale white face in the reflection, / a gaunt, skeletal grimace, / with sharpened teeth / and hollow black eyes, staring at him / with its mouth / wide / open / in a scream….” Jasmine presents White; her closest friends are Rohan, whose name cues him as South Asian, and Mira, who has dark skin.
Light on gore and corpses; otherwise a full-bore, uncomplicated shriekfest. (Horror. 10-13)Pub Date: Nov. 2, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-338-70215-6
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Scholastic
Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2021
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