You have exceeded your limit for simultaneous device logins.
Your current subscription allows you to be actively logged in on up to three (3) devices simultaneously. Click on continue below to log out of other sessions and log in on this device.
Despite some slight overplotting—such salient issues as disability, poverty, and illegal immigration are raised but given short shrift—readers are likely to stick with Sandro till the sweet, wobbly end.
Scary enough to appeal to readers who are growing out of R.L. Stine titles, this may also tempt fans of realistic fiction.—Gesse Stark-Smith, Multnomah County Library, Portland, OR
Spine-tingling mystery meets small-town gossip in this ghost story set in Athens, Ohio, “the most haunted town in America.” Josie Fletcher and her scheming brother Fox are no strangers to the supernatural. But even they get spooked when a dusty Polaroid camera, marked with the initials J. G., starts doing more than taking pictures. Without explanation (and without any film), the ghostlike figure of an elderly, sad-faced man appears in every shot; then it manifests itself as a specter to the children, communicating an urgent message: “Save them.” But save whom? From what? Hayes cloaks the riddle in gothic gloom: is the specter the work of a trick camera, one of the many oddities in their father’s old auction house? Or is it the ghost of John Goodrich, a wealthy recluse whose mad wife perished in a landslide forty years ago, along with most of the town? The Fletcher kids need answers fast if they’re to prevent another disaster. Hindle’s cartoonish illustrations seem too bland for the rich storytelling, but thoroughly creepy motifs—dead moth collections, a centuries-old stickpin carrying a curse, and of course Mothman himself, a flying monster who’s part moth and part man
With its short chapters and simple vocabulary, the novel moves along briskly and would be a good fit for reluctant readers with a taste for baseball and adventure.