SAVE HALLOWEEN!
by Stephanie S. Tolan
When Johnna's teacher enlists her to script the sixth-grade Halloween pageant, the loner is caught between her fundamentalist family's beliefs and the truth her research reveals. Johnna comes from a family of preachers. Short of cash as a result of her father's generosity, her mother invites Uncle T.T., an evangelist, to lead a money-making crusade in their small Ohio town. His condemnation of Halloween as ``the Devil's Holiday'' divides the community. Johnna's opposition to her family will lead her to a new sense of self and new friends, while she discovers her gifts as an author and an evangelist in her own right. Though Tolan opens up the issue of group hysteria without exploring it in depth, that's a minor flaw in a book with several nicely realized characters of quiet courage, refreshingly committed to their faith. (Fiction. 9- 14)