A smart, funny pleasure, as satisfying as sipping lemonade on the front porch with a favorite grandparent
A city girl from Queens, New York, is thrust into the slowed-down homeyness of a small North Carolina town in 1972, but the summer she fears will drag on intolerably soon turns into the mystery of a missing penny and an unknown killer.
When Lizbeth rides her bike to the bridge, she feels the thrill of adventure. A car has gone over it; someone has died. But seeing the dead man's hand flutter lifelessly and learning that a baby has also died, Lizbeth feels the thrill morph into sickness. So begins Lizbeth's quest to discover the origins of the rare 1909 wheat penny that the dying man clung to as he and his baby plunged to their deaths. Melvin’s tale of mystery opens with action, but then the story veers from murder to explore the thornier mysteries of human relationships. As a character, Lizbeth Landers is a spunky girl whose take on life is both illuminating and familiar. With a strong supporting cast that includes her aunt Alice and the new widow Miss Violet, she navigates the tricky waters of long-buried secrets while also learning something about what it means to be part of a community. While the slow pace might deter some younger readers, the beautiful phrasing will help to capture more sophisticated ones.
A smart, funny pleasure, as satisfying as sipping lemonade on the front porch with a favorite grandparent . (Mystery. 10-14)Pub Date: Nov. 4, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-929345-04-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Poisoned Pencil
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2014
A fun, if messy, thriller that’s not afraid to go straight over the top.
A middle schooler must outrun a cadre of strange individuals while puzzling out the truth of what he is in this science-fiction offering.
Fourteen-year-old Noah Prime longs to live somewhere bigger than his small town of Arbuckle, Oregon, though he is happily involved in motocross—at least until he learns that the course is being torn down to make way for a condo development. This bad news coincides with some particularly strange happenings in Noah’s life, such as a literal (and very confusing) collision he has with Sahara, a girl that he comes to find very interesting. This is followed by his experiencing a brief and total paralysis while arguing with some bullies, which his friend Ogden, who is on the autism spectrum, insists is due to a psychological phenomenon called conversion disorder. The truth turns out to be much more complex, and it sends Noah, younger sister Andi, Ogden, and Sahara on a madcap quest involving aliens, time travel, an erupting volcano, and much more. The adventure is laced throughout with goofy, sarcastic humor, balancing the fantastical and somewhat confusing turns of events. While there is resolution at the story’s end, it also clearly sets the stage for a follow-up. The main characters read White by default.
A fun, if messy, thriller that’s not afraid to go straight over the top. (Science fiction. 10-14)Pub Date: April 11, 2023
ISBN: 978-0-7595-5524-2
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Jan. 24, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2023
Light on gore and corpses; otherwise a full-bore, uncomplicated shriekfest.
Does anyone who volunteers to spend a night in a derelict haunted hotel on a dare deserve what they get?
“The hotel is hungry. And we aren’t leaving here until it’s fed.” In what reads like a determined effort to check off every trope of the genre, Alexander sends new arrival Jasmine, along with two friends and several dozen other classmates, to the long-abandoned Carlisle Hotel for the annual seventh grade Dare—touching off a night of terror presided over by the leering, autocratic Grand Dame and complete with sudden gusts and blackouts, spectral visions, evil reflections in mirrors, skeletons, a giant spider, gravity reversals, tides of oily black sludge sucking screaming middle schoolers down the drain, and so much more. (No gore, though, aside from a few perfunctory drops of blood from one small scratch.) The author saves a twist for the end, and as inducement to read alone or aloud in the dark by flashlight, both his language and the typography crank up the melodrama: “He walks toward us, past the mirror, and I see it— / a pale white face in the reflection, / a gaunt, skeletal grimace, / with sharpened teeth / and hollow black eyes, staring at him / with its mouth / wide / open / in a scream….” Jasmine presents White; her closest friends are Rohan, whose name cues him as South Asian, and Mira, who has dark skin.
Light on gore and corpses; otherwise a full-bore, uncomplicated shriekfest. (Horror. 10-13)Pub Date: Nov. 2, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-338-70215-6
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Scholastic
Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2021
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