An ambitious premise that never quite coalesces.
An anxious 11-year-old girl must save her loved ones from the soul-stealing Fear Maker.
One Halloween four years ago, Penny Hope left candy as an offering for the monster under her bed. She receives a gift in return, but it’s only after she accepts it that she realizes it’s cursed, plaguing her with recurring nightmares. In the daylight, Penny sees that everyone around her has blank, hollow eyes. She learns that the giver of the cursed gift, responsible for both her constant bad dreams and the vacant-eyed people, is the Fear Maker—and his power is quickly growing. Armed with her love of poetry and with new friend Aarush Banerjee by her side, can Penny conquer the Fear Maker before he reaps the souls of everyone around her? For much of Allen’s spine chiller, Penny’s struggles are internalized; her fear keeps her from reaching out to those around her. Slowly, she tells those she trusts most, and the narrative takes a turn, moving the needle to genuine scares as Penny and Aarush battle the Fear Maker at his terrifying haunted house. The horror aspects are immersive, but murky characterization and thin worldbuilding leave this novel feeling disjointed and faltering under its own weight. Prose and verse, including a variety of different poetic forms, are interestingly juxtaposed in short chapters. Penny reads White; Aarush is cued South Asian.
An ambitious premise that never quite coalesces. (Horror. 10-12)Pub Date: Aug. 8, 2023
ISBN: 9780374390952
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 24, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
On equal footing with a garden-variety potato.
The new kid in school endures becoming the school mascot.
Ben Hardy has never cared for potatoes, and this distaste has become a barrier to adjusting to life in his new Idaho town. His school’s mascot is the Spud, and after a series of misfortunes, Ben is enlisted to don the potato costume and cheer on his school’s team. Ben balances his duties as a life-sized potato against his desperate desire to hide the fact that he’s the dork in the suit. After all, his cute new crush, Jayla, wouldn’t be too impressed to discover Ben’s secret. The ensuing novel is a fairly boilerplate middle–grade narrative: snarky tween protagonist, the crush that isn’t quite what she seems, and a pair of best friends that have more going on than our hero initially believes. The author keeps the novel moving quickly, pushing forward with witty asides and narrative momentum so fast that readers won’t really mind that the plot’s spine is one they’ve encountered many times before. Once finished, readers will feel little resonance and move on to the next book in their to-read piles, but in the moment the novel is pleasant enough. Ben, Jayla, and Ben’s friend Hunter are white while Ellie, Ben’s other good pal, is Latina.
On equal footing with a garden-variety potato. (Fiction. 10-12)Pub Date: March 24, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-11866-5
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Nov. 23, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
Debut author Greenwald takes on the persona of Charlie Joe Jackson, a middle-school boy who hates reading. His avoidance...
Charlie Joe will do just about anything to avoid reading in this humorous cautionary tale for book-hating middle-grade students.
Debut author Greenwald takes on the persona of Charlie Joe Jackson, a middle-school boy who hates reading. His avoidance techniques get him into serious trouble with his parents, his teachers and his friends. After a year of avoiding reading—paying off a friend in ice-cream sandwiches to read books for him and manipulating his friends so he won’t have to read for the all-important position-paper project—Charlie Joe is forced to spend his summer vacation writing a book about his poor choices. Charlie Joe’s insider knowledge of the inner machinations of middle-school cliques will make younger readers smile in anticipation, and his direct address to readers makes make him feel like an older buddy showing the way. Sprinkled into the narrative are “Charlie Joe’s Tips” to avoiding reading books, written on faux notebook paper, that serve as a little diversion from the plot. As amusing as this is, Charlie Joe’s voice is not consistent and occasionally jars with the intelligent, smart-guy sarcasm that characterizes most of Charlie Joe’s prose.Pub Date: July 5, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-59643-691-6
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Roaring Brook Press
Review Posted Online: June 20, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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