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Book Review: Kiki Macadoo and the Graveyard Ballerinas by Colette Sewall

cover for Kiki Macadoo and the Graveyard Ballerinas

Kiki Macadoo and the Graveyard Ballerinas by Colette Sewall ( Amazon.com )

Owl Hollow Press, 2020

ISBN-13: 978-1945654558

Available: Paperback, Kindle edition

 

Kiki Macadoo, age eleven, and her teenage sister Alison, are going to a special ballet summer camp housed in a Gothic castle in a remote area surrounded by dense forest. Kiki loves ballet but is terrible at it, while Alison is very talented. While both of them are excited about camp, Kiki is nervous, and Alison is bummed because she’ll be spending the summer away from her boyfriend, Dylan.

Despite the camp’s setting, the kids seem pretty normal– they’re there because they want to excel in dance. Sewall writes naturally about ballet and dance, without making the terminology intimidating. Kiki is placed in the lowest dance class, with 8 year olds, but she’s lucky in that she has a pretty good relationship with Alison, her roommate is kind and friendly even though she’s a much better dancer, and the dance teacher is understanding and helpful. The camp director, Madame Dupree, is elderly, forgetful, and a bit eccentric (there’s a subplot where her son’s fiance attempts to have her committed so he can sell the property to developers, but it doesn’t really go anywhere), but she’s also thoughtful and generous. When she learns that Alison will have her sixteenth birthday at camp, she enlists Kiki in helping plan a surprise party for Alison. It’s  refreshing to see a school story, especially one involving teenagers and middle-schoolers, where the main character isn’t bullied because of physical flaws or struggles with learning.  It’s also nice to see the conflicting feelings Kiki has about dance and about her sister– she may struggle but she perserveres.

While the campers have been forbidden from going into the forest, it doesn’t stop Kiki. Her lessons end earlier than Alison’s or her roommate’s, leaving Kiki plenty of time to explore. One of the boys at the school, Oliver, lives on the grounds and tells her she needs to be careful because fairies and spirits live in the woods (Oliver isn’t mocked for dancing; we have come a long way since Oliver Button Is a Sissy). At first she doesn’t believe him, but it turns out that Kiki is one of a rare few who can see them, because she has “ghost eyes”, two different-colored eyes. Kiki and Oliver become friends and explore the forest together (it is almost a character in its own right), and between Oliver’s stories and hints dropped by Madame Dupree, Kiki learns that in addition to harmless spirits, there are some dangerous ones as well. The wilis, water sylphs who died of broken hearts while at ballet camp, draw in any young woman with a broken heart and force her to dance to her death, at which time she becomes one of them. There is a graveyard filled with the bodies of girls who died dancing and became wilis.

The surprise party for Alison does not end well. Alison’s boyfriend shows up with bad grace and she discovers he’s seeing another girl; broken-hearted, she runs into the forest where she is drawn in to the wilis’ dance. As terrifying as they are, it is up to Kiki to break her sister away from the wilis’ spell.

I really liked the author’s choice to make the wilis her dangerous spirits. They are part of Slavic folklore and are not commonly known, but they do appear in the ballet Giselle, which is tragic and terrifying. Giselle is maybe not as well known to the average kid as The Nutcracker or Swan Lake, but that makes the story extra cool in integrating the ballet theme into the story.

As it is a middle grade book, things end well, but the path to getting there has its frightening moments, and definitely magical ones. The door is left open to a sequel, and I’ll be interested to see if one happens and, if it does, where it takes Kiki, Alison, and Oliver next. Recommended for ages 8-13.

Posted on July 1, 2020 by , Reply

Book Review: Shadow School: Archimancy (Shadow School #1) by J. A. White

Shadow School: Archimancy (Shadow School #1) by J. A. White

Katherine Tegen Books, 2019

ISBN-13: 978-0062838292

Available: Hardcover, paperback, Kindle edition, audiobook

 

Cordelia didn’t want to move from sunny California and away from her friends, but her dad’s new job is in New Hampshire,  so now she’s stuck in freezing New Hampshire at creepy Elijah Z. Shadow Middle School, a confusing maze of a building that looks more like a haunted mansion than a public school.  The truth is, it’s both,  Elijah Z. Shadow, the son of freed slaves who became a famous architect, was obsessed with capturing ghosts, and studied the construction of haunted houses in order to build one that would attract and trap ghosts– a process he described as “archimancy” . Only Cordelia and one other kid, Benji, can see the ghosts in the school. Aided by their scientifically-minded friend Agnes, Cordelia and Benji must decide what to do about the ghosts. Should they ignore them, fear them, help them move on, or let the school’s ghost catchers drain them into nothingness? Their adventuring is taking them into dangerous situations.

This is a nicely-done coming of age story tinged with an intriguing mystery, conflicted feelings about friendship, and nods to the horror genre (with teachers named Machen, Derleth, and Aickman– horror loving adults will probably appreciate them more than children). I haven’t seen the idea of studying haunted houses with the intent to trap ghosts elsewhere, although strange architecture certainly does seem to be a feature in many fictional and reputed haunted houses (such as Hill House and the Winchester mansion) and the convoluted piecing together of the story is interesting to see.  In many ways, though, this is more of a story about adjusting to moving, letting go, and building new friendships in middle school than it is about scaring the readers. Although there are a few genuinely scary incidents, White’s previous book, Nightbooks (reviewed here last year as part of this booklist), was far scarier and more disturbing. This is an original take on and loving homage to the haunted house genre, with diverse characters (Cordelia is half-Chinese and Benji is Peruvian) and would likely work well as a relatively gentle introduction to the horror genre for upper elementary and middle school students trying it out for the first time.

Highly recommended.

 

Contains: some violence

 

 

 

Posted on May 19, 2020 by , Reply

Book Review: Pet by Akwaeke Emezi

Pet by Akwake Emezi

Make Me A World, 2019

ISBN-13: 978-0525647072

Available: Hardcover, paperback, Kindle edition, audio CD, audiobook

 

There was a time before the angels came when monsters caged children, polluted the environment, refused to send aid to hurricane victims and refugees, bombed civilians in other countries, shot up schools, and hurt and killed the people around them. The angels led a revolution, changed the laws, and replaced the monuments. Jam’s teachers tell her these angels took their names from angels who weren’t human: but they were imperfect humans doing their best to create a more compassionate, safer, and more just world, and by the time Jam, our protagonist, was born, there are no more monsters.

Or are there?

Jam, curious about the original angels, heads to the library and asks about them, but the pictures she finds are terrifying, not beautiful. She wonders, if angels are terrifying, what do monsters look like? And how would you know? Jam’s mother, Bitter, tells her, “Monsters don’t look like anything… That’s the whole point.” Bitter, an artist, has been consumed with creating a painting of a bloody, goat-legged, horned creature with metallic feathers, and after it is finished, Jam sneaks in to Bitter’s studio and accidentally cuts herself on a razor blade Bitter has embedded in the canvas. Bleeding over it opens a portal, and the creature pushes through, telling Jam to call it Pet.  Pet is a hunter of monsters, called through by her because there is a monster in her friend Redemption’s house that needs hunting, but the adults in Jam’s life are not willing to recognize that a monster could still be in their midst.

I feel like this is Emezi’s response to N.K. Jemisin’s “The Ones That Stay and Fight”, which takes place in a utopian alien society where all people are respected for who they are, but knowledge of the outside world is illegal. That story ends with “social workers” executing a man found to be communicating with the less enlightened people of Earth in front of his daughter and taking her into custody to also become a social worker. In that story, questioning is not allowed and people are willing to live in ignorance of the evils of the past in order to live in their ideal society, and a child who gains that knowledge must become part of enforcing the need for that ignorance.

Pet, while it takes place in our near future, reflects some of this abstract speculative thinking, but as a book written for children, it needs to be set out in a concrete way. Emezi has created a society that is a little different from Jemisin’s: many of the people who live in the community remember the time of the monsters, before the revolution eliminated them, but they choose to believe the monsters are gone. The children born after the revolution learn about that time, but aren’t curious about it. Even knowing that they should remember the past, the people are focused on the the blessings of the present. In visiting her friend Redemption’s house, which has always seemed a loving place, Pet encourages Jam to look past the surface to see the unseen. It is uncomfortable for Jam to question what she has always seen and felt there, even knowing there is a monster in the house, and to tell Redemption about it. It is scary to learn about the monsters that existed in families in the past and realize they are still around. It is terrifying to confront trusted adults and have them refuse to believe. No one actually stops Jam and Redemption, but the adults don’t believe the monster exists, even knowing a child is suffering. Pet is there to end the hunt, and the monster, but Jam has to decide exactly what that means. Pet has a more positive vision for the future than Jemisin saw, but it is clear about the perils of believing that there can be an ideal world where monsters no longer exist.

Pet also n9rmalizes and celebrates differences without going into detail about them. Jam is a 16 year old black trans girl who is a selective mute; Redemption has three parents, one of whom is nonbinary; the librarian whizzes around in a wheelchair.  Emezi does not stick with standard English. Language is very individual and informal, and dialogue is sometimes almost musical. Without going into graphic detail. Emezi is able to communicate who the monster in Redemption’s house is, and what he has done.

While Jam is supposed to be 16, she neither acts or is treated like a 16 year old. Her thoughts and actions are more like what I would expect from a 10-12 year old, and I think she may have been “aged up” to make it possible for her to have used puberty blockers and had transition surgery (neither of these details are necessary to establish her as a transgender character, so if that was Emezi’s reasoning, the story would have benefited from aging Jam’s character down). While the story does get very dark, I think kids as young as fifth grade might be able to manage this book. At this point, fifth graders have certainly been exposed to the news, and this book gives them a way to process what they’re seeing in the media from a different perspective.  Certainly, my children both read The Giver, which has similar themes, at that age. This is a very relevant book, and while not typical horror, it does have unsettling and disturbing moments. Highly recommended.

Contains: Violence, references to rape and child sexual abuse

 

 

Posted on November 7, 2019 by , Reply
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