Delightfully spooky—readers may want to avoid dolls for a while after finishing this one.
A witch dolls up local children by transforming them into, well, dolls.
Sixth-grader Josie, along with her mother and younger sister, Anna, moves from Chicago to a small town to live with their grandmother. Grandma Jeannie, who is experiencing memory loss, has only three house rules: Windows must stay closed after dark, no dolls are allowed inside, and, it is forbidden to visit the house in the woods where Beryl lives. When Josie and her sister start hearing voices calling to them in the night they begin to understand and abide by these rules. School and a growing friendship with classmate Vanessa bring some normalcy to Josie’s new life. But when the two girls arrange to spend time together after school, Vanessa’s house turns out to be the one Josie’s grandma warned her about. Will Josie escape, or will she end up like the hundreds of other doll-children collected in the house? Alexander’s middle-grade debut (this is a pen name; the author also publishes as Alex R. Kahler) is well-plotted genre fiction, with plenty of suspense and eerie imagery. Grandma’s memory loss reads more like a trope than accurate characterization, but her involvement in the witch’s backstory adds depth to the otherwise simple narrative. Lacking any signifiers, the cast assumes a white default. Josie is vegetarian.
Delightfully spooky—readers may want to avoid dolls for a while after finishing this one. (Horror. 8-13)Pub Date: Aug. 28, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-338-21224-2
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Scholastic
Review Posted Online: May 27, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2018
A slow, slight story enlivened by likable characters and a nice dose of humor. Twice.
Six 14-year-old boys, all classmates, must sit tight in their school bathroom while they wait out a storm warning, a forced interaction that causes the barriers between them to fall.
Although there isn’t much story, it’s told twice, once as a novella, the second time as a play. The plot is a kind of stripped-down, reasonably witty, all-male middle school version of The Breakfast Club, though it lacks that property’s heart and gravitas. Readers will both like and recognize the diverse group of characters, such as the brainiac or the hostile, seemingly dumb one, and the jokes mostly land. But for boys of that age, these characters are remarkably live-and-let-live, with no harsh teasing of the anxious new kid with the stuffed cat, for example. This goodwill creates minor rather than major tension between them, which, coupled with the lack of action, makes the novella feel rather sluggish. It’s better as a play, partially because it’s cut to its essentials, partially because the story’s shape, simple set, and group of individuals artificially stuck together as interior revelations play out lends itself to the form. Drama teachers may find it a useful demonstration of how to turn prose into dramatic writing.
A slow, slight story enlivened by likable characters and a nice dose of humor. Twice. (Fiction/drama. 9-13)Pub Date: May 10, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4814-5223-6
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2016
The journey is even gently funny—Omakayas’s brother spends much of the year with a porcupine on his head. Charming and...
This third entry in the Birchbark House series takes Omakayas and her family west from their home on the Island of the Golden-Breasted Woodpecker, away from land the U.S. government has claimed.
Difficulties abound; the unknown landscape is fraught with danger, and they are nearing hostile Bwaanag territory. Omakayas’s family is not only close, but growing: The travelers adopt two young chimookoman (white) orphans along the way. When treachery leaves them starving and alone in a northern Minnesota winter, it will take all of their abilities and love to survive. The heartwarming account of Omakayas’s year of travel explores her changing family relationships and culminates in her first moon, the onset of puberty. It would be understandable if this darkest-yet entry in Erdrich’s response to the Little House books were touched by bitterness, yet this gladdening story details Omakayas’s coming-of-age with appealing optimism.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-06-029787-9
Page Count: 208
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2008
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