Shivers aplenty; just the ticket for a cold autumn night.
A preteen overcomes fear to solve a century-old mystery.
Tessa Woodward and her family have moved from warm, sunny Florida to chilly, gray Chicago. It’s bad enough that she had to leave behind her best friend and beloved beach, but as soon as the white girl moves into the eerie, rambling Victorian on Shady Street, myriad unexplainable things begin to happen. Lights flicker and doors lock on their own; mysterious crying and phantom footsteps echo throughout the house in the middle of the night; perfectly executed drawings appear in artist Tessa’s sketchbook; and her 4-year-old brother’s perennially creepy ventriloquist dummy cries actual tears. There can be no other explanation: this house is haunted. Who, or more likely what, has targeted Tessa, and why? The terrified seventh-grader enlists her new friends—skeptic Andrew and graveyard expert Nina, both evidently white—to follow a trail of clues in order to find out what happened in the house on Shady Street all those years ago. Refreshingly, Tessa isn’t an angry kid determined to make her parents’ lives miserable in retaliation for uprooting her from the familiar. Instead, she resolves to make the best of things and to take her free-spirited parents’ advice that she keep her eyes wide open and explore the unknown. And that she does.
Shivers aplenty; just the ticket for a cold autumn night. (Paranormal mystery. 8-13)Pub Date: Oct. 10, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-4814-7704-8
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Aladdin
Review Posted Online: July 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2017
Good Guys and Bad get just deserts in the end, and Stanley gets plenty of opportunities to display pluck and valor in this...
Sentenced to a brutal juvenile detention camp for a crime he didn't commit, a wimpy teenager turns four generations of bad family luck around in this sunburnt tale of courage, obsession, and buried treasure from Sachar (Wayside School Gets a Little Stranger, 1995, etc.).
Driven mad by the murder of her black beau, a schoolteacher turns on the once-friendly, verdant town of Green Lake, Texas, becomes feared bandit Kissin' Kate Barlow, and dies, laughing, without revealing where she buried her stash. A century of rainless years later, lake and town are memories—but, with the involuntary help of gangs of juvenile offenders, the last descendant of the last residents is still digging. Enter Stanley Yelnats IV, great-grandson of one of Kissin' Kate's victims and the latest to fall to the family curse of being in the wrong place at the wrong time; under the direction of The Warden, a woman with rattlesnake venom polish on her long nails, Stanley and each of his fellow inmates dig a hole a day in the rock-hard lake bed. Weeks of punishing labor later, Stanley digs up a clue, but is canny enough to conceal the information of which hole it came from. Through flashbacks, Sachar weaves a complex net of hidden relationships and well-timed revelations as he puts his slightly larger-than-life characters under a sun so punishing that readers will be reaching for water bottles.
Good Guys and Bad get just deserts in the end, and Stanley gets plenty of opportunities to display pluck and valor in this rugged, engrossing adventure. (Fiction. 9-13)Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 978-0-374-33265-5
Page Count: 233
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2000
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The three way chats, in which they are joined by other animals, about web spinning, themselves, other humans—are as often...
A successful juvenile by the beloved New Yorker writer portrays a farm episode with an imaginative twist that makes a poignant, humorous story of a pig, a spider and a little girl.
Young Fern Arable pleads for the life of runt piglet Wilbur and gets her father to sell him to a neighbor, Mr. Zuckerman. Daily, Fern visits the Zuckermans to sit and muse with Wilbur and with the clever pen spider Charlotte, who befriends him when he is lonely and downcast. At the news of Wilbur's forthcoming slaughter, campaigning Charlotte, to the astonishment of people for miles around, spins words in her web. "Some Pig" comes first. Then "Terrific"—then "Radiant". The last word, when Wilbur is about to win a show prize and Charlotte is about to die from building her egg sac, is "Humble". And as the wonderful Charlotte does die, the sadness is tempered by the promise of more spiders next spring.
The three way chats, in which they are joined by other animals, about web spinning, themselves, other humans—are as often informative as amusing, and the whole tenor of appealing wit and pathos will make fine entertainment for reading aloud, too.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 1952
ISBN: 978-0-06-026385-0
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1952
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