adapted by Jo Ann Ferguson ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 26, 2016
Fans of the movie may enjoy it.
A demon catches four young teens on Halloween, intending to turn them into monsters.
This middle-grade series kickoff features teens Beth, Kellen, Luke, and Nicole, white except for Asian-American Nicole. Kellen yearns for childhood friend Beth, Nicole seems to have a crush on Kellen, and Luke cares only about cracking jokes. ’Tis the season, and Dr. Hysteria arrives in town with his Hall of Horrors, supposedly holiday entertainment for the town. But Beth takes a wrong turn inside the attraction and realizes that the monsters are real. When she stumbles on the titular cabinet, she finds not only a girl who went missing a year ago from another town, but also many others, some in historical clothing. She realizes that Dr. Hysteria is a demon and that he has trapped her friends…and perhaps also has trapped her. Adapting the book from the screenplay for the 2015 film R.L. Stine’s Monsterville: The Cabinet of Souls, Ferguson keeps the creep factor high and the originality factor low. Befitting its status as a movie tie-in, the book contains glossy photos of the characters in a four-page inset. While the story starts with some unrequited romance, it quickly begins to focus on suspense and horror, with beautiful, blonde Beth as the star trying to save herself and her friends.
Fans of the movie may enjoy it. (Horror. 8-12)Pub Date: July 26, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-338-03252-9
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Scholastic
Review Posted Online: March 15, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2016
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by Kate DiCamillo ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 5, 2024
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
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by Max Brallier ; illustrated by Douglas Holgate ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 13, 2015
Classic action-packed, monster-fighting fun
Awards & Accolades
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12
Our Verdict
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New York Times Bestseller
It’s been 42 days since the Monster Apocalypse began, and 13-year-old Jack Sullivan, a self-proclaimed “zombie-fighting, monster-slaying tornado of cool” is on a quest to find and rescue his not-so-secret crush, June Del Toro, whether she needs it, wants it, or not.
Jack cobbles together an unlikely but endearing crew, including his scientist best friend, Quint Baker; Dirk Savage, Parker Middle School’s biggest bully; and a pet monster named Rover, to help him save the damsel in distress and complete the “ULTIMATE Feat of Apocalyptic Success.” Middle-grade readers, particularly boys, will find Jack’s pitch-perfect mix of humor, bravado, and self-professed geekiness impossible to resist. His sidekicks are equally entertaining, and it doesn’t hurt that there are also plenty of oozing, drooling, sharp-toothed monsters and zombies and a host of gizmos and gadgets to hook readers and keep them cheering with every turn of the page. Holgate’s illustrations play an integral role in the novel’s success. They not only bring Brallier’s characters to life, but also add depth and detail to the story, making plain just exactly how big Rover is and giving the lie to Jack’s “killer driving.” The marriage of text and illustration serves as a perfect example of what an illustrated novel can and should be.
Classic action-packed, monster-fighting fun (. (Graphic/horror hybrid. 8-12)Pub Date: Oct. 13, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-670-01661-7
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: July 21, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2015
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