A somewhat messy but satisfying ghost story for young readers.
A debut novel introduces a boy investigating the mysterious happenings in a Louisiana house.
Matt Franklin doesn’t want to have to stay with his aunt and uncle in the Louisiana swamp, but his busy parents don’t give him a choice. Don’t they care that they will miss his 12th birthday? When he gets to Louisiana, Aunt Eartha serves him gator nuggets while his cousin Lucy keeps disappearing into the house’s secret passageways. At least there’s a giant library—the biggest that Matt has ever seen: “Three floors high of all books. A stained glass, dome ceiling that’s allowing plenty of bright sunlight to pour in. Towards the right is a beautiful spiral staircase that gives you access to each floor.” It turns out that the house contains a massive bomb shelter beneath it, which explains all the extra space. Unfortunately, the shelter is the place where more than 100 people burned to death in 1829. When Lucy invites Matt to join her on an investigation into the mysterious smoke that they both have smelled in the area, he reluctantly agrees. That night, when they hear unusual noises coming from the library, Lucy and Matt sneak in and are confronted by an incredible sight: a real ghost. Unluckily for Matt, things only get spookier from there. At under 60 pages, this series opener, aimed at grades four to six, is a quick read that doesn’t have time to dally. Valentino writes in an energetic prose that keeps the story light, even if it’s not the best suited style for building subtle tension: “I’m sure you’re getting tired,” Aunt Eartha tells Matt the first night, “and we’re all usually in bed around here by 10:00, it’s safer. I mean, it’s better! Yeah, it’s...it’s better to get a good night’s rest is all.” While the backstory of the house is perhaps needlessly complex, the mystery should please young readers with its Scooby-Doo-esque mix of humor and creepiness. Matt and Lucy make a fun pairing, and the audience will get to enjoy their further adventures in the series’ next installment.
A somewhat messy but satisfying ghost story for young readers.Pub Date: April 24, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4840-3391-3
Page Count: 56
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Aug. 1, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...
Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.
Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60737-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
Britisher Swift's sixth novel (Ever After, 1992 etc.) and fourth to appear here is a slow-to-start but then captivating tale of English working-class families in the four decades following WW II. When Jack Dodds dies suddenly of cancer after years of running a butcher shop in London, he leaves a strange request—namely, that his ashes be scattered off Margate pier into the sea. And who could better be suited to fulfill this wish than his three oldest drinking buddies—insurance man Ray, vegetable seller Lenny, and undertaker Vic, all of whom, like Jack himself, fought also as soldiers or sailors in the long-ago world war. Swift's narrative start, with its potential for the melodramatic, is developed instead with an economy, heart, and eye that release (through the characters' own voices, one after another) the story's humanity and depth instead of its schmaltz. The jokes may be weak and self- conscious when the three old friends meet at their local pub in the company of the urn holding Jack's ashes; but once the group gets on the road, in an expensive car driven by Jack's adoptive son, Vince, the story starts gradually to move forward, cohere, and deepen. The reader learns in time why it is that no wife comes along, why three marriages out of three broke apart, and why Vince always hated his stepfather Jack and still does—or so he thinks. There will be stories of innocent youth, suffering wives, early loves, lost daughters, secret affairs, and old antagonisms—including a fistfight over the dead on an English hilltop, and a strewing of Jack's ashes into roiling seawaves that will draw up feelings perhaps unexpectedly strong. Without affectation, Swift listens closely to the lives that are his subject and creates a songbook of voices part lyric, part epic, part working-class social realism—with, in all, the ring to it of the honest, human, and true.
Pub Date: April 5, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-41224-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1996
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