An enjoyable collection of ghost stories, perfect for reading by flashlight.
Summoning the courage to open a creaky door inside a spooky old house, Jack finds himself in a candlelit room with 12 strangers sitting around a table.
Someone brings him a chair, and thus begins an evening of storytelling as, one by one, Jack’s companions share haunting tales, each extinguishing a candle when done. Thirteen tales—Jack’s is the last—are framed by brief introductions from the storytellers, characters in their own rights, lending depth to this lightly illustrated collection of stories within a story. In “Let Me Sleep,” a man is haunted by the voice of someone he’s robbed and killed until he returns to the burial site. “The Wrong Side of the Road” features a taxi ride that ends with terrifying similarity to a crash the passenger caused a year before. A character with a “craggy face” tells a tale of “darkness inside darkness” in “The Patchwork Sailor.” A man writes himself to death in “Unputdownable,” and in “Snowstorms,” one Antarctic explorer after another mysteriously disappears. The tales become increasingly eerie as the candles are blown out and Jack realizes what his own role is.
An enjoyable collection of ghost stories, perfect for reading by flashlight. (Short stories. 9-13)Pub Date: July 28, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-545-81665-6
Page Count: 256
Publisher: David Fickling/Scholastic
Review Posted Online: April 14, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Ebulliently original.
Who can't love a story about a Nigerian-American 12-year-old with albinism who discovers latent magical abilities and saves the world?
Sunny lives in Nigeria after spending the first nine years of her life in New York. She can't play soccer with the boys because, as she says, "being albino made the sun my enemy," and she has only enemies at school. When a boy in her class, Orlu, rescues her from a beating, Sunny is drawn in to a magical world she's never known existed. Sunny, it seems, is a Leopard person, one of the magical folk who live in a world mostly populated by ignorant Lambs. Now she spends the day in mundane Lamb school and sneaks out at night to learn magic with her cadre of Leopard friends: a handsome American bad boy, an arrogant girl who is Orlu’s childhood friend and Orlu himself. Though Sunny's initiative is thin—she is pushed into most of her choices by her friends and by Leopard adults—the worldbuilding for Leopard society is stellar, packed with details that will enthrall readers bored with the same old magical worlds. Meanwhile, those looking for a touch of the familiar will find it in Sunny's biggest victories, which are entirely non-magical (the detailed dynamism of Sunny's soccer match is more thrilling than her magical world saving).
Ebulliently original. (Fantasy. 11-13)Pub Date: April 14, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-670-01196-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2011
The creator of Alex Rider follows his two Horowitz Horror anthologies with a new collection of 14 bloody stories. A would-be writer seeking revenge for stolen ideas stalks and apparently kills author Darren Shan (is this wish fulfillment?). In the far future, a robot nanny malfunctions with horrifying consequences. A girl finds herself put up for auction when her family’s finances tank and is terrified when she discovers what the bidders plan to do with her should they win. The standouts of this uneven collection include the false introduction and conclusion supposedly written by others and a bad dream recounted in verse. Good kids find themselves trapped in bizarre situations and bad kids get just what they deserve and more every time. Inconsistent Americanization and lengthy setups mar these at-times predictable tales. An overreliance on grisly moments and contrived twists for what scares there are guarantees there’s nothing to keep the lights on late, just occasional ick. Fans of the previous collections will be right at home. (Horror/short stories. 9-13)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-399-25451-2
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Philomel
Review Posted Online: July 15, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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