A Review of Three Quarters Dead by Richard Peck

I first heard about this book a couple of years ago at an SCBWI Conference where Richard Peck spoke, mentioning his upcoming projects, and I've been looking forward to it ever since. How would one of the greatest craftsmen in the field of children's books handle YA paranormal?

Of course, you could argue that he's already done that with his Blossom Culp books, which I always thought were middle grade, but which are now being called YA, at least in the front matter of this new book. But the Blossom books are also historical fiction, and Three Quarters Dead is about a contemporary teen.

Kerry is a sophomore attached to a popular, powerful trio of senior girls: beautiful Tanya, graceful Natalie, and lively Makenzie. Kerry earnestly assures us that the three of them aren't mean girls. Her reasoning? They talk to her. (Never mind the little zingers they throw in.) They sort of include her. And even though events—along with outside observers—conspire to convince Kerry that she is being used, the heady wine of hanging out with this particular group has her too drunk to admit things aren't so great.

Readers will be quick to see that Tanya, the leader of the pack, is a little obsessed with a particular boy and with destroying the girl she thinks stole him from her. She enlists Kerry's help without giving her any real information, then leaves Kerry hanging when her plans go south. Which is just one example of the small and large clues we get about Tanya's true nature. Another key point in the early chapters is Kerry noticing Tanya's seeming ability to stop time, or rather, to draw it out to suit her purposes.

[SPOILER, THOUGH IT'S IN THE PUBLISHER'S BOOK BLURB AND NONE OF THIS WILL MAKE SENSE IF I DON'T TELL YOU!] Then the unthinkable happens: Tanya, Natalie, and Makenzie are killed when they wrap their car around an apple tree. Here's where Peck's premise gets extra good. Kerry goes into a fugue state, until one day she gets a text message from Tanya telling her to meet the three dead girls in the city at Tanya's Aunt Lily's apartment. Kerry's reaction is relief: "I'd known all along this entire...situation had been too bad to be true."

The haunting of Kerry, which she participates in fervently for pages, is horrifically satisfying. Here's a brief sample, when the four girls dress up in old-fashioned clothes from Aunt Lily's closet to go out on the town. Note the author having fun with macabre puns, the eerie scent of apple blossoms (referring to the tree the car hit), and narrator Kerry's oblivious acceptance of the fact that the dead girls need "major makeup":

There wasn't a mirror on any wall, and that was better. There'd been thousands of us in the mirrored dressing room. Now it was just us four. Taller in our heels, swirlier in our skirts, bigger and bustier in our bras. I was the only one who didn't need major makeup. Just a little something to make my eyes pop. Too much makeup too young is always a dead giveaway, Tanya always said. Too much makeup is always about being the most desperate girl in ninth grade.
Though as Tanya also said, "A little lip gloss wouldn't kill you, Kerry."
There we were in a room that had never changed, the four of us in a dangle of earrings, a wobble of heels, in a cloud of Arpège perfume out of a swag bag. The Arpège fought a little with the lily of the valley, and just under that, apple blossom.

Peck uses the archaeological dig that is Aunt Lily's closet to suggest timelessness, then embroiders these scenes with elderly women hiding from the ghosts in a neighbor's apartment. Of course, the old women represent the way Kerry should be reacting.

The driving force in this book is Kerry's unwillingness to let go—and her problem with being such a follower. You could read the entire haunting as taking place in Kerry's mind if you really wanted to, but I don't think that's what Peck is doing here. Kerry's eagerness to be haunted is just as creepy as the ghosts themselves, and as painful. When Kerry finally snaps out of it, readers will be cheering for her emancipation.

By the way, there's a touch of romance here, but nothing that overwhelms a story that's essentially about girls and their friendships.

Now, as far as suspension of disbelief goes, Tanya's powers work best when they're not examined too closely. There was one point late in the book where I felt like we got a little too much explaining and I found myself doubting Tanya's abilities, but for most of the story, I was completely sold on these events.

Other than that, the only false note qualifies as a quibble: Dear Mr. Peck, Teenage boys today are not called Bob or Sandy. You might get a Rob, an Alex, or a Xander, but that's about it. The youngest Bob I know of is my brother, and he's 49. While Sandy is a 63-year-old plumber. (Fortunately, the key boy in this story is named Spence!)

Quibbles aside, I think the most gorgeous thing about Three Quarters Dead is the tone, Kerry's voice and the way it interacts with pacing to build suspense. Peck has Kerry recount her experiences by looking back on the whole thing. In another book, this might create a sense of drag, but here it suits the genre, evoking a hushed midnight rendering of a ghost story lit only by a sleep-over flashlight. Considering the framing, there's an amazing feeling of suspense as we watch Kerry make a series of mindless mistakes, putting complete trust in someone who doesn't deserve it whether she's alive or dead. Reading Three Quarters Dead feels like watching one of those movies where the girl walks down the long hall of the haunted house, and you tell her on the screen, "Don't open that door!" You know, the door with the monster behind it? But of course she does.

And isn't that what high school is like sometimes, when you can be enthralled by a "friend" who is nothing but trouble, nothing but selfish? Even so, Three Quarters Dead isn't preachy; it's just scary. And—no surprise here!—beautifully well written. It's a slim book, but then, there's never a wasted word in the work of the fantastic Mr. Peck.

If you like this ghost story, try Margaret Mahy's The Tricksters (for older teens).

Note for Worried Parents: Three Quarters Dead is a book for teens, though it's pretty wholesome other than some teen drinking, a scene in a nightclub (mostly dancing), and a little talk about dressing to enhance one's breasts.

A Review of The Pickle King by Rebecca Promitzer

The Pickle King reminds me of a particular group of books, most of them about villainous factory owners, particularly food fabricators, and many of them drizzling with perpetual or near-perpetual rain: Fortune's Magic Farm by Suzanne Selfors, The Secret of Zoom by Lynn Jonell, Canned by Alex Shearer, and The Deep Freeze of Bartholomew Tullock by Alex Williams. More distantly, Pickle King has echoes of Charles Dickens and Joan Aiken. In each book, evil rich people oppress a town, their misdeeds covered up by bribery and/or dark magicks. The awful secrets are eventually brought to light by a kid or a group of kids.

Amazon calls this a YA, although it reads like middle grade fiction much of the time. The publisher's website says "10 and up." The Pickle King includes horror elements such as rats, roaches, and, most important, human body parts. In some ways, the book is simply a mystery about contemporary kids. But psychic powers, hidden histories, and things like a secret community of misfits living beneath a garbage dump make it more of a paranormal/fantasy/horror story, part of a new subgenre inspired by books like Neil Gaiman's The Graveyard Book.

This entrant is a little uneven, but there are quite a few things I liked about it. The setting has a nice Twilight Zone vibe, and Bea draws you into her worries as well as her friendships and adventures. I was basically a happy reader for about half the book, after which I felt a slight loss of interest. I ended up being disappointed by the way the story concluded—as much for plot choices as for a heavy-handed cliffhanger after what seemed like four final chapters in a row.

The rain is essentially a character here, and Promitzer describes it really well, bringing it up over and over again. If you get tired of this, recall that main character Bea is just as sick of it as you are! One of her chief goals in life is to escape the rainy town of Elbow and go visit a place like Florida, where the sun shines. Here's a rainy sample from the first chapter:

Anyway, it was summer vacation in Elbow and, of course, it was pouring rain.
I don't know if you've ever been anywhere where it rained for a few days without a break, not even a little one. If you have, you'll know that it makes you feel edgy, kind of jumpy inside. There are shadows, an unnatural kind of light, strange rainy noises, and you start to feel like you can't trust the regular things around you, the things you take for granted. Sometimes it seems like the things you've seen in scary movies or your own nightmares have come alive and are real—and have moved in for good. Other times it's as though you're living underwater and there's no air, and you really start to believe the sun will never ever shine again. It's no good for anybody to spend the summer in Elbow, but it's the kids like me who have to hang around; kids with no money or no parents or a bit of both. Some of us have got green growing between our toes from all the rain. It's a kind of mold. Bertha says it's the start of webbed feet.

TV screenwriter Promitzer tells a fairly compelling story in The Pickle King, and readers will find themselves going along for the ride with Bea on the bike she has spray-painted purple. The first place Bea brings us is an old house, where her friend Sam shows her a dead body. Aspiring photographer Bea takes pictures of the corpse, only to find when she gets home that the dead man's ghost appears to be haunting her camera.

Bea is accompanied by a nice little cast of characters. First there's Sam, a kid from the wrong side of the tracks who is alternately neglected and abused by his thuggish older brother and his father the drunk. We also get Sam's dog Jellybean, who provides comic relief along with some Lassie-like proclivities in a crisis. Sam and Bea reluctantly seek out other members of "The Summer Club," starting with rich girl Madison, whose initial superficiality and shoe fetish turns out to hide her unhappiness and a bad habit. Next we meet Eric, a young mad scientist who's really not that good at inventing things, and Butterfly, who is endlessly doomed to babysit her younger brother, Nelson.

Throw in some sinister villains, a jar of Herman's Red Devil Relish (also haunted), and you've got quite the summer vacation! Although sometimes the "blech" factor seems a little calculated, young readers will probably get a kick out of it. This book is obviously intended to be followed by a sequel. While I could wish for a slightly stronger plot next time, I do recommend Bea Klednik as your guide to some unusual adventures.

Note for Worried Parents: Sam smokes, and he offers to share his cigarette with the other kids, one of whom accepts. Other than that, just the horror elements mentioned above and a little preteen attraction—one kiss and some hand-holding, for example.

A Review of Spellbinder by Helen Stringer

Like the rest of her spiritually gifted family, Belladonna Johnson can see ghosts, so when her parents die in a car accident, they don't actually leave—they just keep living in her house. They can cook for her, read the newspaper, do all the parental things except taste the dinner for spices and give her hugs. Her grandmother pretends to be her guardian by stopping by on a regular basis, but really, things haven't changed much at all. Except that 12-year-old Belladonna has trouble telling the difference between ghosts and non-ghosts, so she's deathly afraid of slipping up and talking to ghosts in front of her peers.

So begins this clever new book from a British expat living in Los Angeles. (Spellbinder is clearly set in England.) Only the humor slips away a bit, leaving us with a darker tone, when all of the ghosts in town start to disappear. Right before he goes, Belladonna's dad tells her to call her aunt, but uptight Deirdre refuses to explain anything to Belladonna. Her grandmother also underestimates Belladonna, who naturally takes matters into her own hands.

In this she is assisted by Steve Evans, a kid who is constantly getting in trouble at school thanks to his exceedingly creative exploits, and by Elsie Blaine, the only ghost who has managed to escape the mass disappearance. Well, there is one other ghost still hanging around on the Other Side, as Belladonna and Steve discover when they manage to find the last door and get over there. He is the sinister alchemist Dr. Ashe, who tells Belladonna and Steve to find a missing amulet in order to solve the ghost problem. But he doesn't seem particularly trustworthy, so what does he really want?

Stringer uses some familiar tropes, such as the young person with a powerful mission who doesn't know her own special destiny and appearances from evil spy ravens, hellhounds, oracles, and the Wild Hunt. I was also faintly reminded of Jodi Lynn Anderson's Maybird and the Ever After because of the whole chthonic theme and setting. (I love that word!) But the author manages to infuse Spellbinder with freshness thanks to her strong way with words, her appealing characters, and some clever plot twists. For instance, the location of the missing amulet, let alone how Belladonna and Steve must retrieve it, is original as well as hilarious.

Belladonna is a likable heroine, one of those shy kids who just hopes not to be noticed—even if it is because she can see ghosts. Stringer's school scenes are handled deftly. The kids go on a field trip to Arkbath Hall, and the author perfectly captures what that's like. Here's a sample:

They stopped in front of a massive black gate, and Mr. Watson pressed the doorbell. He turned and looked out over his charges, suddenly nervous.

"Now, I want—for God's sake, Evans, give the boy his glasses back!—I want you all to behave yourselves.

Arkbath Hall was built in the late fifteenth century—"

"Sixteenth," muttered Belladonna.

"Sorry? Yes, very good, Johnson, the late sixteenth century. Quite right. Anyway, it's very old, so I don't want any of you touching anything. Is that clear?"

Silence.

"I said: Is that clear?"

Twenty-eight dreary voices said, "Yes, Sir," in unison, though not one of them sounded even remotely like it had heard what Mr. Watson had said.

He looked at their faces as their attention wandered to the building, the
grass, and the snail on the path. Belladonna suspected that in his quiet hours Mr. Watson despaired for the future of their country.

Stringer's humor gives this often dark book a surprisingly light touch. For example, as the above scene continues, the guide at the castle, who I should point out manages not to be a flat character, tallies up the students using a counter, leading Belladonna to wonder why he needs "a mechanical device to count to twenty-eight."

Later we get the daunting headmistress, Miss Parker, who has a buzzer and little lights outside her office door—

The green one said "Enter," the orange one said "Wait," and the red one said "Busy." According to Steve, if the red one came on when you knocked at the door, then you could go back to class, and sometimes she'd forget all about you.

It's touches like these that really bring the book to life.

Belladonna's accomplice Steve is one of the best characters in the book. I've seen a lot of roguish lads in this kind of story, but he comes across as more of a curious, bright kid than a troublemaker, though his troublemaking talents enable him to be a great help to Belladonna. The interactions between Steve and Belladonna ring so true that this duo seems more real than many other such teams in children's fantasy.

Another colorful character, Elsie the ghost girl, died playing tennis at the school a century ago (the story of her death is very funny). She and Steve instantly clash. Elsie is one of those exasperatingly chirpy girls, yet she turns out to be helpful as Belladonna and Steve move forward with their quest.

Some of Stringer's inventions work better than others. I was a little uncertain about the charnal sprites, but they do play a key role later in the book.

The Wild Hunt brings up a mystery involving Belladonna's aunt, one that will obviously be addressed in the future. We are also left wondering about Steve's mother and even the true identity of the headmistress. Stringer further hints at the existence of a mastermind overseeing the villain featured in this debut book.

Spellbinder is a first novel and every once in a while it shows, but I really like this book, which besides being funny and adventurous is simply a well-told tale. I was pleased that it ended thoroughly, even while hinting at a sequel. For middle grade fantasy enthusiasts, Spellbinder is a real find.

A Review of Kate and M. Sarah Klise's 43 Old Cemetery Road Books

I hope you've already read the Klise sisters' other "graphic epistolary novels," Letters from Camp and the series that begins with Regarding the Fountain. Each clever, lighthearted book consists of a sequence of letters, memos, newspaper articles, and postcards, all written by Kate Klise and illustrated by M. Sarah Klise. But saying that doesn't do justice to these off-the-wall, character-driven books, which I highly recommend for 7- to 10-year-olds. Just to give you an idea, Regarding the Fountain is about what happens at a school when the principal orders a new drinking fountain, but the fountain designer has something a thousand times more elaborate in mind (think spa!). A group of kids at the school is also involved in the project, along with some colorful characters from the small town... It's a hoot!

I recently bought Book 2 of the Klises' new series, 43 Old Cemetery Road, so then I had to go back and read Book 1, as well. As usual, the premise is more than a little loopy: a cranky old children's book writer named Mr. Grumply rents a house for the summer, trying to get past his writer's block, but neglects to read the fine print. It states that he is also assuming custody of the absentee landlords' eleven-year-old son Seymour and his cat Shadow for the foreseeable future. What's more, the house is haunted by a previous owner, Olive C. Spence (a deceased mystery writer—read her name out loud fast!). Olive acts as a surrogate mother to Seymour because his own highly negligent parents are off in Europe trying to prove that there's no such thing as ghosts. It takes Mr. Grumply a while to realize that the "Dear Housemate" notes he's getting aren't all from Seymour, and to believe that Olive isn't a hoax. Other missive writers in the book include Mr. Grumply's lawyer, a realtor named Anita Sale, the absent parents, and the town paper, which has a running joke of quoting people as follows:

"Personally," continued Sale, "I think Ignatius Grumply is an old grouchypants, but don't print that in the newspaper."
(Sorry, Anita. Your secrets are our business!)

Book Two, Over My Dead Body, introduces a man named Dick Tater, head of IMSPOOKY (The International Movement for the Safety and Protection of Our Kids and Youth). Tater is determined to abolish Halloween and break up Seymour's new family just because it includes a ghost. In short order, Tater has Ignatius Grumply thrown in the Illinois Home for the Deranged for believing in ghosts, while Seymour is dumped in an orphanage. Another threat in this book is Seymour's despicable parents, who plan on coming back for him simply so they can use him as a prop to increase the sales of their new book, Only Fools (and Children) Believe in Ghosts. But Olive is not without resources, and even as Tater threatens to exhume her grave, she gets busy rescuing her adopted family and showing Tater just how real a ghost can be.

One thing I like about the Klise sisters' books is that they're not a threatening read thanks to the graphic component and the small chunks provided by the letters, yet they require readers to make a certain amount of effort in order to put all of the pieces together. If you haven't tried the Klise creations, I suggest you give them a chance. There's really nothing like them on the market!