In this brooding debut teen chiller, 13-year-old Courtney “never had believed in wicked witches, invisible ghosts, or haunted ivy,” but everything changes when she and her parents move into an 18th-century stone house adjacent a Puritan cemetery in Murmur, Mass. Gazing at the vine-draped house and trees, Courtney wonders, “What’s with all the ivy?” Quickly obsessed with the equally ivy-infested cemetery, Courtney finds herself drawn to Christian and Margaret Geyer, an eccentric father and daughter intent on resolving a family mystery. As Courtney and the ethereal Margaret piece together clues from old journals and newspapers, the ivy invasion of Courtney’s house becomes increasingly demonic. Frightened, but determined to help her friends, Courtney realizes spirits both visible and invisible are using her to find the missing remains of Margaret’s ancestor Prudence to release an ancient spell surrounding the house. The suspense builds, but like a true gothic heroine, Courtney keeps her cool and retains just enough disbelief to prove credible amid the graveyard gloom and irrational ivy. A creepy but grounded caper. (Horror. 12-14)
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-7624-3313-1
Page Count: 232
Publisher: Running Press
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A girl’s interest in family history overlaps a coming-of-age story about her vestigial understanding of her mother after death, and her own awareness of self and place in the world. Junior high-school student Carrie Schmidt identifies strongly with the missing girls of 1967’s headlines about runaways. Carrie’s mother is dead and she has just moved in with her grandmother, Mutti, who embarrasses her with her foreign accent and ways. Carrie’s ideal is her friend Mona’s mother, a “professional” who dresses properly, smells good, and knows how to set out a table; readers will grasp the mother’s superficiality, even though Carrie, at first, does not. Mutti has terror in her past, and tells Carrie stories of the Jews in WWII Vienna, and of subsequent events in nine concentration camps; these are mined under the premise that Carrie needs stories for “dream” material and her interest in so-called lucid dreaming, a diverting backdrop that deepens the story without overwhelming it. Mutti’s gripping, terrible tales and the return of an old friend who raised Carrie’s mother when she was sent to Scotland at age nine awaken in Carrie a connection to her current family, to her ancestry, and, ultimately, to a stronger sense of self. This uncommon novel from Metzger (Ellen’s Case, 1995, etc.) steps out of the genre of historical fiction to tell a story as significant to contemporary readers as to the inhabitants of the era it evokes. (Fiction. 10-14)
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-670-87777-8
Page Count: 194
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1999
Askew is a compelling, almost shamanistic figure (not another Skellig, but close), and both in tone and locale this powerful...
Almond (Skellig, 1999) spins teenagers of very different backgrounds and experience into a whirl of ghosts and dreams, stories-within-stories, joy, heartache, and redemption.
In order to be able to care for his newly widowed grandfather, Kit has moved with his parents to the town of Stoneygate, perched in desolate decline on top of a maze of abandoned coal mines. He is soon drawn to follow wild, unstable, aptly named John Askew into a game called “Death” that leaves him sealed up in a tunnel; Kit emerges from the darkness with images of children and others killed in the mines flickering at the edge of his sight, and a strange, deep affinity for Askew. Inspired by Askew’s brutal family life, and gifted with a restless, brilliant imagination, Kit begins a prehistoric quest tale involving two lost children—a story that takes on a life of its own. Setting his tale in a town where the same family names appear on both mailboxes and tombstones, and where dark places are as common as sad memories, Almond creates a physical landscape that embodies the emotional one through which his characters also move, adding an enriching symbolic layer by giving acts and utterances the flavor of ritual.
Askew is a compelling, almost shamanistic figure (not another Skellig, but close), and both in tone and locale this powerful story is reminiscent of Alan Garner’s Stone Book quartet. (Fiction. 12-14)Pub Date: March 7, 2000
ISBN: 0-385-32665-3
Page Count: 228
Publisher: Delacorte
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1999
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