Something Wicked This Way Comes: Serafina and the Black Cloak by Robert Beatty

"Never go into the forest," Pa had told her many times. "There are dark forces there that no one understands, things that ain't natural and can do ya wicked harm."

Pa has his reasons. He found the infant Serafina, a half-dead newborn at the place of a bloody struggle in the deep forest, a place that humans have feared since ancient times. And Serafina was not the usual infant foundling: she had only four toes and fingers on her feet and hands, her spine had extra vertebrae which make her unusually supple, and her collarbone is not joined, letting her squeeze into small spaces. And then, there are her large yellow eyes that can see as well by night as by day.

Pa's job is to keep the steam engines and giant electric dynamo running to keep lights on at the Vanderbilt estate in the North Carolina mountains, and at first it is easy to keep little Serafina hidden with him in the labyrinthine cellars beneath Biltmore. But Serafina is now 12, curious about the world above, and uses her small size and agility to squeeze through the air ducts and hide in dark corners upstairs to spy on the lives of the Vanderbilts upstairs. She even manages secretly to befriend the lonely young Braeden Vanderbilt, orphaned nephew of the masters of the house.

And when Serafina encounters an elderly guest, Mr. Thorne, wrapped in a frightful black cloak that seems to have a life of its own, she watches him seize the young girl guest, Clara Brahms, who seems to vanish in a black, stench-filled cloud inside the cloak. Serafina and Braeden watch other children disappear, first another wealthy guest, Anastasia Rostonov, and then Nolan, son of the stable master, taken from their carriage on a dim track through the forest.

Serafina feels that she alone can stop the devastation of the Black Cloak, but to do so, she has to confront the horrible apparition deep in the dark forest.

On the other side of the two crossed, she came into a boscage of rotting dead snags, with rocks on the ground as sharp as ax blades. The narrow, overgrown track twisted and turned, and dove down into a rocky ravine, and she couldn't see what lay beyond.

As she gazed at the darkened passage, a shiver went through her spine. She had no idea where it would lead her, but she started down the path.

Like the sorcerer's stone that grants eternal life and unbridled power, the evil black cloak needs a human body to carry out its evil ends, and as Serafina confronts the decaying Mr.Thorne inside the cloak in the graveyard deep in the woods, even she must resist its attraction, its offer of all knowledge, all power, and life everlasting.

Robert Beatty's Serafina and the Black Cloak (Hyperion Books, 2016), only published last month, has become an instant best seller and a classic tale of the young hero or heroine called to go forth in the battle with good and evil. Like the Harry Potter stories, with which it shares many elements of fantasy, this new novel offers the same non-stop immersion into the narrative, the same seemingly flawed, halfling hero who confronts evil, that made Rowling's series iconic. Beatty's narrative in Serafina's voice is hypnotically engrossing, filled with action and insight that foreshadows great sequels to follow, one of which has just been published, Serafina and the Twisted Staff (A Serafina Novel) and looks to establish itself as an American classic in the vein of the English fantasy tradition that gave us Tolkien's Lord of the Rings trilogy, Lewis' Narnia books, and Rowling's Harry Potter series, with the eternal struggle against evil all wound thrillingly inside our own native Appalachian folklore. A strongly written novel and a killer-diller thriller for summer reading.

Last-Minute Gifts: Boxed Sets for the Fantasy Fiction Fan

A great gift for a young reader, boxed sets provide the most bang for the buck and provide a comfortable cache of books for those long dreary days of midwinter ahead.

For middle readers, fantasy fiction seems to be the main draw this year. Here are some sets that have been best sellers..

Rick Riordan's Percy Jackson has some problems, an unpleasant stepfather and a series of schools that have determined that they can get along without him, thank you, but being a demi-god, the son of a mortal and an Olympian, is the sort of problem which gets him into some adventures beyond the usual 'tween boy variety. That rare series, beloved of reviewers and readers alike, Percy Jackson and the Olympians Hardcover Boxed Set: Books 1 - 5, comes with all five books in its own "steamer trunk" with a so-cool hidden compartment for mere mortal secrets.


Humorist Dave Barry and Ridley Pearson have combined their considerable talents to create the backstory of how orphan Peter acquires his powers as the hero of the classic Peter Pan. Pirates, faery starstuff, villainous seadogs, courageous heroes and heroines, and non-stop adventures make the first three books of this series favorites of reviewers and real page turners for middle readers. Also just out for the hardcore fanatasy fan is the latest top seller in this series, Peter and the Sword of Mercy (Starcatchers).


When Kendra and Seth are put under the care of their Grandfather Sorenstan, the overseer of the mysterious Fablehaven wood, they learn that that gated forest is the home of fairy folk, imps, satyrs, and trolls which threaten their own safety and that of the world. Brandon Mull's best-selling series, together here in his Fablehaven (Boxed Set): Fablehaven; Rise of the Evening Star; Grip of the Shadow Plague, offers fantasy and fast-paced adventure for both boys and girls in the elementary and middle school grades.


Forced to move into their great-uncle Spiderwick's dilapidated and frankly spooky old house, Simon, Jared, and Mallory Grace soon learn that there are sinister powers and strange creatures abroad on the property, and the three quarrelsome siblings soon learn that they must combine forces to fight the evil influences which draw them into their cosmic struggles. DiTerlizzi's and Black's first five quaintly illustrated volumes are found here in their The Spiderwick Chronicles (Boxed Set): The Field Guide; The Seeing Stone; Lucinda's Secret; The Ironwood Tree; The Wrath of Mulgrath and continued in their new set, Beyond the Spiderwick Chronicles (Boxed Set): The Nixies Song; A Giant Problem; The Wyrm King.


"There will be three who hold the power of the stars in their paws." With this prophecy, the three young cats, grandchildren of Firestar of the ThunderClan warriors, each with his or her own special birthright of powers, must fight to preserve their kind in Erin Hunter's Warriors: Power of Three Box Set: Volumes 1 to 3 in this top-selling series of fantasy adventures for elementary and middle readers. For an added treat, the fourth book in this popular series, Warriors: Power of Three #4: Eclipse, has just been published this fall.

Christmas Wishes? The Christmas Genie by Dan Gutman

You're probably not going to believe this story.

Fine. That's okay. It's a free country.

But I know what happened, because I was there. Where's there? Lincoln School in Oak Park, Illinois. Fifth grade.

It happened just before winter vacation, on December 21. That's the winter solstice....

Foreshadowing!! English folklorists know that it is on the shortest, darkest day of the year, when the unseen world is closest, that strange things can happen. It was on that midwinter eve when, in Susan Cooper's Newbery-winning The Dark Is Rising (The Dark Is Rising Sequence), Will Stanton's walk in the new-fallen snow takes him back in time to fight the renewed rising of the forces of darkness.

Dan Gutman's latest, The Christmas Genie, doesn't involve cosmic battles with good and evil, but a presentiment of a squat, wise-cracking spirit which emerges from a meteorite which falls, auspiciously, right through Chase's desk, interrupting Mrs. Walters' science lesson, which appropriately enough is on meteors. For a thirteen million light-years old genie, "Bob" is amazingly with it, dressed in flip flops and a tie-dyed tee and spouting the latest put-downs.

"You speak English?"

"Any dope can speak English," the genie said. "It's Japanese that's tricky."

"You ARE a genie, aren't you?" I said.

"Well, I ain't Santa Claus, that's for sure."

The disgruntled gremlin does make a deal with the amazed class--he'll grant one wish in return for their silence about his sudden appearance, with the caveat that they must come up with it within the hour or Bob will cancel their winter break. Mrs. Walters, ever vigilant for a teaching opportunity, springs into action, handing out 3 x 5 cards and instructing each student to submit one wish for class consideration. That woman can make an assignment out of anything, Chase grumbles to himself.

"Oh, one more thing." Bob said, "Remember the old saying--'Be careful what you wish for.'"

Borrowing from folklore, Gutman slyly makes that theme real for the fifth graders. Chase's wish for "all the money in the world" is shot down quickly by the class pragmatist who points out that if no one else had any capital, there would be no products to buy with his money. Other wishes prove equally problematic: kids get the vote? But they'd probably elect Miley Cyrus president, one realist says. Room-sized flat-screen TVs for everyone? Some people don't even have electricity or houses with walls to put them on, another points out. Every day is your birthday? You'd be dead in three months! The clock clicks inexorably forward as the stack of wish cards shrinks, with no agreement among the kids.

Will Mrs. Walters' class wind up with no wish and no winter vacation either?

Gutman, a best-selling author praised for his ability to draw reluctant male readers under his free-wheeling, humorous spell as shown in his earlier Nightmare at the Book Fair, and his prolific My Weird School Daze series (found here: and his historical sports fantasy series, Baseball Card Adventures (see here), manages to come up with more than just a goofy Christmas story. Gutman's books are known to be potent boy bait, while, as in the case of The Christmas Genie, artfully slipping in some thought-provoking themes among the hilarious and inventive plot lines. As one reviewer put it, "Gutman packs plenty of history, science, and ethics lessons in this fun, well-paced fantasy that happens to take place at Christmas, but will be enjoyed at any time of year. This book is laugh-out-loud funny from page one."

A Bolt from the Blue: Jolted: Newton Starker's Rules for Survival by Arthur Slade

Newton Starker knew he would most likely die from a lightning strike.

It would all happen in the blink of an eye. Zap!

One fried fourteen-year-old Newton, the last male heir of the Starker line.

In a parallel universe to that of Harry Potter and Hogwarts, Newton Starker knows that he, too, is stalked by a miscreant and malevolent force, a sudden bolt of lightning, perhaps from the blue of an innocent spring sky, the same force that has killed his mother. Without the physical mark on his forehead, Newton nevertheless wears the psychological scar of his family's fatal curse.

Unwilling to remain secluded for life in the concrete geodesic dome his father had built in a vain attempt to safeguard his mother, Newton throws all his energies into learning the art of self-preservation at an eccentric boarding school, the Jerry Potts Academy of Higher Learning and Survival, a quirky twist on the boarding school where students wear kilts and are advised to keep their Scots dagger, the sgian dobh, sharp at all times. Potts Academy, dedicated to the skills of survivalism in the wild or in the economic jungle of modern life, seems Newton's only hope of finding salvation from his fate, through the "fierce intelligence" which the school inculcates in its students.

Because his family's deadly history is well-known, Newton has had few friends: most kids have been well advised to keep their distance outdoors to avoid becoming collateral damage in the course of the execution of Starker curse. At Potts, though, Newton is quickly befriended by Jacob Clarke, part Scots, part black, part Mi'kmaq Indian, a prolific writer who is apparently unperturbed by proximity to a human lightning rod.

Like Harry Potter, however, Newton quickly acquires an enemy, a rival in the person of Violet Quon for the top marks which will put him into the Hall of Heroes. Violet is not above a bit of academic sabotage, and Newton is certain that she is the person responsible for his kilt dropping in the midst of his impassioned recitation of Bobbie Burns' "Red, Red Rose." Newton, a devotee of culinary art, manages to outscore Violet in their first kitchen combat--the "Mystery Meat" survival cook off, which he wins with his own recipe utilizing roadkilled ground squirrel in a French truffle-spiced quiche.

Acquiring the truffles for the dish brings Newton his second friend. Because of his fractured French, the shipment of truffles comes with a truffle-seeking piglet, Josephine, who seems to have powers far beyond the usual porker.

But Newton still needs expert advice in his search for survival, and for this he goes to the nearby nursing home where his 102-year-old great-grandmother, the only Starker known to have survived to old age, resides. Newton approaches the sour old woman gingerly, hoping to learn her secret, but what he hears seems impossible to carry out:

"I want to know how you've lived so long," said Newton.

"Spite, Great-grandson. Lovely, gorgeous, unyielding spite. I hate everyone--everyone I have ever met...."

"You hate everyone?"

"Even you.... I'll even outlive you, Newton." She pointed a crooked finger at him. "Would you like to bet on it?"

"No. Not at all."

Newton feels he must try his great-grandmother's solitary way to survival, but in the freshman class' first Outdoor Expedition, 48 hours of survival in the wilds, Newton discovers that he just doesn't have it in him to leave Violet hurt and alone in the woods, even to score marks on his way to the Hall of Heroes. And then, in probably the only unselfish act of her long self-preserving existence, Great-Grandmother Enid takes a bolt that is obviously intended for Newton, and his coming-of-age comes in a literal burst of light.

Arthur Slade's Jolted: Newton Starker's Rules for Survival is funny and poignant, a different sort of rite of passage story in an offbeat setting which somehow feels just right for Newton Starker. This story will resonate with early teen readers, kids who sometimes feel that adolescence itself carries its own kind of curse.

Rest in Peace: The Funeral Director's Son by Coleen Murtagh Paratore

To live. To love. To leave something better behind.

Three simple things to get yourself a spot in heaven.

It sounds simple, but you'd be surprised how people can screw things up. Most everyone who dies in Clover moves on without help from me. They live, they love, they leave something better behind. And so, when the ship comes, they're ready to go to good.

That's what I think Heaven is. Good.

But other people have trouble leaving. Anchors weigh them down. Something they didn't say. Something they didn't do. That's where I come in.

I've been helping the dead for a while now, but I made up my mind, I'm quitting.

Twelve-year-old Kip Campbell is the seventh Christopher Campbell, the only son of the town of Clover's undertaker, the presumed future director of Campbell & Sons Funeral Home. For now Kip is the "outside man." He mows the grass and sweeps the steps and parks the cars for big funerals. Beyond these mundane duties, though, Kip has inherited the family "gift," passed on to one of each generation, the ability to hear the newly dead speak and to help them resolve the ties to life and move on to the good.

But Kip's wish is to move on himself, to leave Clover behind in a few years and to move into the wider world. But like the newly dead he hears inside his head, Kip is tied to Clover by his desire to please his kind parents and grandmother, and his worries about the family finances, now falling into dire straits by the competition with a big box funeral franchise which is taking away their generations-old business.

And then there's Billy Blye, lying dead downstairs amid what Kip calls the "Frankenstein stuff," whose voice Kip hears, pleading for his help in slipping the anchors of his life.

Kip was always afraid of Billy in life--a scary old hermit with one eye and a loud, angry voice who once chased him away from his property when Kip's kite got tangled up in the roses on his fence. Why would Billy Blye turn to Kip now? What was the secret that he concealed in life and from which in death he begs to be freed?

Almost against his will, Kip is drawn into this mystery. Billy's voice keeps coming to him, telling him about someone or something called "Hook" who can reveal the secret, but the only Hook Kip can connect to Billy is his old parrot. When Kip slips into the dead man's cottage, he finds the bird still in his cage, muttering strange things over and over. "Akilder. Akilder," and "Fergimmecarry. "Fergimmecarry."

Unraveling the sense behind the mysterious drowning of of Billy and, ten years before, his wife Kerry, becomes Kip's task in Coleen Murtagh Paratore's The Funeral Director's Son (Simon & Schuster, 2008), a quest which takes him deep into the past life of the coastal town of Clover and deep into the secrets of the human heart as well. Although Kip has his gift and the good luck of a four-leaved clover talisman on his side, in the end he still has the mystery of his own future left to unravel. Although Kip finds some peace in his new understanding of the place of his family in the fabric of his hometown, his own conclusion remains yet to be written.

Paratore's characters and setting are strong and engaging. Kip himself is both a believable twelve-year-old, concerned with getting money for camp with his friends and impressing the pretty new girl in his class, and an enigmatic figure, gifted beyond his years with a psychic connection to the afterlife which he wears comfortably most of the time. For those readers who are unsatisfied, still wishing to know what Kip will do with his gift, luckily Paratore has a sequel, The Funeral Director's Son: 'Kip Campbell's Gift, forthcoming in August.

Paratore is also the author of the popular The Wedding Planner's Daughter (The Wedding Planner's Daughter #1) and its sequels also known jointly as The Cupid Chronicles (The Wedding Planner's Daughter #2.).

Roaming Rondo: The Key to Rondo by Emily Rodda

"Leo! Do you realize that we're fairy tales to these people just like they're fairy tales to us? It's so weird!"

"I know." Leo whispered back. "But, Mimi, that's not all. I think--"

"What?" Mimi asked impatiently.

Leo took a deep breath.

"Mimi," he said, "I think Spoiler--is Wicked Uncle George."

When methodical, cautious Leo inherits an intricately handpainted music box from his Great Aunt Bethany Langlander, he accepts unquestioningly the rules carefully taped to the bottom of the antique keepsake:

Turn the key three times only. Never turn the key while the music is playing. Never pick up the box while the music is playing. Never close the lid until the music has stopped.

Leo is fascinated with the tiny, complex scenes, some visible only with his magnifying glass, inscribed on the box. Searching the tranquil village and woodland scenes, he is horrified to find a detail--a wolf about to pounce upon a sleeping babe--which suggests an evil undercurrent in the placid landscape. But when his moody and impulsive cousin Mimi Langlander comes to visit, she stubbornly breaks all the rules. Winding the key five times, Mimi finds that she has opened a mysterious connection between her world and the world depicted on the music box. To the children's terror, the Blue Queen pictured on the box appears and tries to drag Mimi back into her world. Despite Leo's quick action in stopping the music box's playing, the foiled queen takes Mimi's dog Mutt hostage as she vanishes back into the painting on the box.

Distraught by the frozen scene of Mutt held prisoner in the Blue Queen's arms and vowing to rescue her dog, Mimi vanishes into the mist swirling about the box and in trying to stop her, Leo, too, is drawn into the world of Rondo. There the two children begin a quest to find the Blue Queen's castle, and with the aid of a seemingly powerful ring dropped by the queen, return to the real world with Mutt.

Rondo is a bizarre, enchanted land, filled with kind strangers, strange villains, and fairy tale creatures--trolls, fairies, witches, rampant gingerbread people, and talking animals, including a vain but valiant guard pig named Bertha who joins their quest to overcome the Blue Queen. As they follow adventure through fantastic forests and wasted villages, Leo and Mimi learn that their own family has long moved in and out of Rondo, their deeds changing both the world there and the world back home. They meet two fabled relatives who, without the fabled Key, have long been trapped in Rondo--their greedy Great-Uncle George, who is allied with the Blue Queen, and their kind and heroic Great-Uncle Henry, who helps them complete their quest. There, in a final confrontation with the Blue Queen, Mimi learns that, like Dorothy in Oz, she has had the Key to Rondo in her possession all the time.

Emily Rodda's Key To Rondo is both novel and strangely familiar, borrowing much from well-known fantasy classics and fairy tales. Rodda's writing, however, is so immediate and compelling that the touches of familiar territory seem reassuring and almost inevitable. The complex story begins intriguingly but slowly, but as trust and affection grow between the two cousins, the quest becomes more compelling and tension builds to a satisfying conclusion.

The Aussie queen of fantasy, Rodda continues the story of Rondo in The Wizard of Rondo, published in Australia in October of 2008. Other of her award-winning novels include the Deltora Quest, Deltora Shadowlands, and Rowan of Rin series.

Tennessee Kids Volunteer Their Choices: A Dog's Life and The Lightning Thief Earn Top Spot

Upper-grade kids know what they like, and Tennessee's middle readers and teens have voted their choices for the 2009 Tennessee Volunteer State Book Awards in the Grade 4-6 and 7-12 divisions.

Best-selling Newbery Honor author Ann M. Martin, writing in the first-person voice of a stray dog improbably named Squirrel, has won the top spot for Grades 4-6 with her A Dog's Life: Autobiography of a Stray, beating out such strong competitors as Mike Lupica's baseball saga Heat, Cynthia Lord's Newbery Award-winning Rules, and Margaret Peterson Haddix's sci fi thriller Double Identity.

For a review of this book, see my earlier post here.

Taking top honors with teen readers is the first book in Rick Riordan's wildly popular series, Percy Jackson and the Olympians, titled The Lightning Thief (Percy Jackson and the Olympians, Book 1)./

Riordan, who now has Book 5, The Last Olympian (Percy Jackson & the Olympians, Book 5), forthcoming on May 5, apparently has the touch for writing best sellers for male readers in the page-turning fantasy adventuress of a troubled dyslexic boy who learns that he is the demigod son of Poseidon in this series of modernistic updates of the Greek pantheon which has pleased critics and young adult readers alike.

Delve Deep: Dark Whispers (Unicorn Chronicles III) by Bruce Coville

The Chiron gazed down at Cara. ... It's often the case that our most intimate enemies are rooted in our own darkness. The delvers are dwarfs bent and shaped by the Whisperer. And the Whisperer is a living thing, formed from the unicorns, pulled from their own hearts.... This is why delvers are drawn to unicorns at the same time that they despise them.

They burn with hatred yet also with a deep desire to connect.

Bruce Coville's long-awaited third book in the Unicorn Chronicles, Dark Whispers (Unicorn Chronicles) has both satisfied and teased his legions of fantasy fans.

In plot, characterization, and setting, this book exists in media res: As the murderous powers of Beloved plan their attack during the Blood Moon, young teen heroine Cara, granddaughter of the Unicorn queen and daughter of one of the vengeful Beloved's Hunters sworn to destroy the unicorns, is sent on a mission by her grandmother Amalia Flickerfoot to learn the secret of the enmity from the king of the Centaurs. With her go Lightfoot the unicorn prince, Grumwold the Dwarf, and Medafil the Griffon. Captured by the delvers and imprisoned in their underground kingdom, Cara befriends a rebel delver she calls Rocky, and together the two escape the subterranean maze of tunnels and complete her quest, only to find that they must rush to the unicorns' Autumnhaven to help fight the final battle.

In a parallel storyline, Cara's father Ian Hunter, who has broken with the evil Beloved, travels to the Himalayas with a special portkey jewel and the mission of releasing his wife, Cara's mother Martha, daughter of Queen Amalia, from the Rainbow Prison. Ian Hunter's hope is to free her and gain her powers in the ultimate confrontation between the forces of Beloved and the unicorns.

Alas for his readers, that final battle is reserved for what may be the final volume in the series. Coville carefully braids together the many story lines left mostly untold in the first two books into a leisurely exposition which gradually tightens into a page-turning adventure ending on the eve of the final confrontation. The sole unknown left for the last sequel is the nature of the dark entity known only as "the Whisperer," who is the prime mover of the apocalyptic battle to come. Echoes of J. R. R. Tolkien abound in this skillfully constructed "middle earth" universe in which Cara is at the very center of the web of complexity. A compelling character not unlike Harry Potter, she is the mystical hero-heir, the great unknown, and the nexus of the series.

Coville's faithful followers, many who began with Book I, Into The Land Of The Unicorns (Unicorn Chronicles) and Book 2, Song Of The Wanderer (Unicorn Chronicles), years ago will race through this one with the joy of unwinding a major part of the story mixed with the sadness of discovering they must wait for another volume to reach the story's core. Book IV, The Last Hunt, is promised for publication by Scholastic Press early in 2010.

Ever After: Ever by Gail Carson Levine

With all the hoopla that the final book and the first movie of the Twilight series received, it is important that Gail Carson Levine's new fantasy novel not be overlooked in this obsession with Bella and Edward. In Ever Levine has, with her usual careful craft, fashioned a tale in a similar genre, a tale of two star-crossed lovers, one beautiful, young, and all-too-human, one beautiful, lonely, and immortal, set like a jewel in two ancient, vaguely middle Eastern lands, Hyte and Akka.

Kezi is a beautiful, talented girl just coming of marriageable age, a promising weaver and graceful dancer. But when her mother suddenly falls gravely ill, her grief-stricken father's spontaneous prayer to the one god, Admat, promises a sacrifice of the first person to congratulate him on the recovery of his wife. As fate would have it, Kezi's beloved great-aunt brusquely pushes her way into the sickroom and begins to voice her heartfelt joy at his wife's return to health. Kezi spontaneously interrupts and speaks the fateful congratulations herself to save her aunt, dooming herself to become the death sacrifice instead.

Granted thirty days of life before her sacrifice at the hands of the priest, Kezi is determined to make the most of what is left of her youth. Dressed in her finest robe and her mother's jewelry and dancing at a cousin's wedding, Kezi catches the eye of a startlingly handsome young man, dressed as a slave working at the celebration. Soon she learns that the beautiful servant is Olus, god of the winds, from the neighboring kingdom of Akka. Olus confesses that at seventeen he is bored and lonely among the old and immortal gods who live suspended above the human world of Akka. Olus admits that he has long been a "pretend mortal," envious of the active and unpredicatable lives led by humans.

But as he falls in love with the doomed Kezi and she with him, Olus becomes determined to cheat the mysterious Admat of his prize. He persuades Kezi to leave her family and fly with him on his winds to Akka and take on a quest to become one of the immmortals among his family. To win immortality for Kezi, Olus must perform heroic deeds to become a champion, and Kezi herself must descend into the Underworld of the Warki and pass her own ordeal without eating or drinking while below. The young lovers wonder if Admat's absolute power is real and if He, as the One God, has the power over Olus and his fellow gods to exact the fatal price of Kezi's father's oath. Both realize that the question will only to be resolved when Kezi returns to Hyte to redeem her family from the wrath of Admat by submitting herself to the death sacrifice.

In a fantasy driven by a delicious and delicate romance and the serious theme of the meaning of mortality and immortality, Newbery author Gail Carson Levine (winner for her humorous and meaningful look at the Cinderella theme, Ella Enchanted) has penned another thoughtful fantasy for reflective young adult readers.

It Takes a Graveyard: The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman

Ever since the child had learned to walk, he had been his mother's and father's despair and delight, for there never was such a boy for wandering, for climbing up things, for getting into and out of things. That night he had been woken by the sound of something on the floor beneath him falling with a crash. Awake, he soon became bored, and had begun looking for a way out of his crib....

He landed with a muffled thump on a small mound of furry, fuzzy toys. He was surprised when he hit the floor, but he did not cry out; if you cried out, they came and put you back in your crib.

He crawled out of the room. Stairs that went down, he had discovered, were fairly simple. He did them sitting down, bumping from step to step on his well-padded bottom.... When he reached the last step, when he reached the little hall and stood up, the diaper fell off. He stepped out of it. He was only wearing a child's nightshirt. The stairs that led back up to his room and his family were steep, but the door to the street was open and inviting....

The child stepped out of the house a little hesitantly. The fog wreathed around him like a long-lost friend. And then, uncertainly at first, then with increasing speed and confidence, the boy tottered up the hill.

By now most people interested in the 2009 Newbery Award book, The Graveyard Book, have heard Neil Gaiman's explanation of how, with Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book on his mind, he took his two-year-old son to a nearby cemetery to let him ride his tricycle away from any danger of traffic, and in one of those creative connections which writers make, began to imagine a parallel story about a toddler whose family is killed by a midnight murderer and who unknowingly wanders away and into the kindly care of the ghosts within a neighboring graveyard.

There's no bouncy Disney soundtrack to this parallel, no singing and dancing phantasms, but the kindly Owens take the two-year-old into their mausoleum and make sure that he has a name (Nobody Owens) and everything he needs to grow up as a live boy in a community of benevolent ghosts. There is a mysterious Celtic tomb guarded mindlessly by the slithery Sleer, a Roman soldier who is the oldest human ghost residing there, ghosts of long-dead children who become his playmates, and a sixteenth-century witch who rescues him from mortal danger only when the, um, spirit moves her. Like Mowgli, Bod has a "retired" teacher who educates him in reading and history and other human learning, and he has a mentor, Silas, a being existing between life and death, who instructs him in the ways of the everyday world--and of that other world from which his family's enemies spring--and who ultimately helps him leave his hallowed refuge behind for the wider world of the living.

Bod grows up with the Freedom of the Graveyard, learning the secret ways of shades--fading, dreamwalking, haunting, and seeing in the dark--but knowing all the time that that man--one of the group of assassins all known as Jack--waits for him just outside the sanctuary of the graveyard gate.

But when Bod is five years old, he makes a friend among the living, a girl named Scarlet whose parents bring her to the graveyard to play inside the nature preserve which the old burial ground has become. Bod's connection with Scarlett inevitably draws him into the outside world and inevitably into both danger and the chance to make a life, a fully human life, in it.

Silas said, "Out there, the man who killed your family is, I believe, still looking for you, still intends to kill you."

Bod shrugged. "So?" he asked. "It's only death. I mean, all of my best friends are dead."

"Yes," Silas hesitated. "They are. And they are, for the most part, done with the world. You are not. You're alive, Bod. That means you have infinite potential. You can do anything, make anything, dream anything. If you change the world, the world will change. Potential. Once you're dead, it's gone. Over. You may be buried here, you may even walk. But that potential is finished."

Despite its unique setting, The Graveyard Book is far from grim or terrifying, peopled as it is with a memorable community of spirits with all the marvelous vagaries of living people. The story is filled with humor and adventure, moral hazard and courageous, self-sacrificing deeds--everything an absorbing coming-of-age tale should have. As in A Wrinkle in Time, the The Chronicles of Narnia, and the Harry Potter series, among other well-known fantasies for young people, Gaiman plucks his young hero out of the everyday world and puts him in the company of fantastic characters and into the thick of the good vs. evil struggle between the seen and the unseen world.