In The Book of Dead Days, Marcus Sedgwick introduces us to Boy, a teenage orphan who is the servant and apprentice to a stage magician named Valerian. Valerian is on a quest to find a book that will help him get out of a deal he made with supernatural forces to give up his life in […]
Category: book reviews
Four of Poe’s classic tales are presented here. In The Black Cat, a man blames his black cat for his descent into murder and madness, The Masque of the Red Death is a tale about nobles who hole up in a castle in an attempt to escape the disease that is ravaging the countryside. Hop-Frog is a story about a […]
Review: Skeleton Man by Joseph Bruchac
February 24, 2015Joseph Bruchac retells a tale from the Mohawk Indians about a man who was so hungry he ate his own flesh, leaving nothing but a skeleton, and then ate the rest of his family with the exception of a young niece. In Bruchac’s story, Molly’s parents mysteriously disappear one evening without a trace. Molly is […]
Third in the series, the continuing saga of siblings Aimee and Shane Lancaster, descendants of Ichabod Crane, who is responsible for the many demons, spirits, and creatures that haunt Sleepy Hollow. Aimee and Shane feel a duty to track down and stop these critters that their ancestor has unleashed upon the town. In this installment, […]
Don’t make the mistake of thinking these stories are for children. They’re not (just in case the impressive cover art didn’t give it away). With this collection of short stories, children’s writer David Lubar has crossed into the world of YA fiction with thirteen tales that are vicious, creepy, and will give you the chills. […]
Review: Bloody Horowitz by Anthony Horowitz
January 27, 2015Bloody Horowitz is a collection of short, scary stories by Anthony Horowitz, author of the Alex Rider books. It is a little dark and, at times, a little gory. But it also had me cracking up. From the forward (“Why Horror Has No Place in Children’s Books”) to the editor’s note at the end detailing all of […]
Review: The 5th Wave by Rick Yancey
January 23, 2015The Others are coming. In five waves, they have been laying waste to everything we are and think of us as nothing more than annoying insects, or a disease that needs to be eradicated. The first wave crippled the world. The second obliterated much of it in a heartbeat. The third took much longer but […]
Review: Ashfall by Mike Mullin
January 20, 2015I first learned of Ashfall in November of 2011, and I should have reviewed it long before now. It was chosen by more than one professional journal as one of the best young adult novels written in 2011, and I definitely agree with that, and now it has just been nominated as one of the Best Teen […]
Review: Cinder by Marissa Meyer, read by Rebecca Soler
January 16, 2015Cinder is a retelling of the classic fairy tale, but it is not the “Cinderella” from your childhood or from the landmark animated film. It is the first of four books in The Lunar Chroniclesseries; future volumes will deal with “Little Red Riding Hood”, “Rapunzel”, and “Snow White.” Meyer’s debut novel includes all the relevant elements of the original […]
Review: The Raven Boys by Maggie Stiefvater
January 13, 2015Blue is the only non-psychic in a household of psychic women, and all of them have predicted with certainty that when she kisses her true love, he will die. On St. Mark’s Eve, when the veil between the world of the living and the dead has lifted, she sees her first ghost, who identifies himself […]