The world can be a spooky place for children, and not just at election time.
Sorry, couldn't resist.
A couple of my grandnieces like reading "spooky" books. Here are two that I've recommended to them, and one more which I just finished today so I've not yet had the chance to send it their way. They are Middle Readers, which is probably my favorite age group to read in, when I'm not being an adult. Frankly, those Middle Reader books present more intriguing premises, more exciting adventures, and far more likeable people than most "adult" books.
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First, Neil Gaiman's 2002 masterpiece "Coraline". Great movie. Better book.
If you've seen the movie, you know the premise. Coraline and her parents move into an old house they jointly own with a couple of elderly sisters who were once famous actresses. Coraline finds a hidden door, crawls through it, and finds herself in a world mirroring her own in many ways, with her "other parents", similar neighbors, similar woods adjacent to the property, and the same haughty black cat - well, that cat can talk. Coraline soon
realizes that there's a sinister undercurrent underneath it all.
The movie was reasonably faithful to the book, more so than most adaptations are. But, like most adaptations, it fell short. For starters, the book has Neil Gaiman's splendid, masterful writing. His descriptions plant you firmly in the worlds he creates; his protagonists are immensely likeable and his antagonists immensely... creepy. The other world Coraline enters promises her the attention she is missing from her sometimes distracted parents. Coraline sees through the ruse in practically no time, and would simply return to her own world and simply be content, but the evil on the other side wants her. And her parents. And her neighbors.
Coraline isn't going to let that happen. How she stops it (with the help of the cat) makes for a more suspenseful, and ultimately more satisfying journey, than the movie.
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Next, M.P. Kozlowsky's 2011 debut, "Juniper Berry", aptly subtitled "A tale of terror and temptation."
Eleven year old Juniper Berry has a dream life - or at least she used to. Her parents are famous movie stars and she lives in a huge house. She writes plays that she and her parents perform together, and they are tremendously happy together. Or at least that's the way it used to be. She still writes the plays, but since becoming famous, her parents have grown increasingly distant and no longer have time for her. At times they are downright cold.
Juniper finds a friend in her neighbor Giles, a lonely boy whose parents have also grown distant and cold. Together they find a secret world underneath a gnarled old tree, and there they discover the horrifying reason why they are losing their parents. There they meet the sinister Skeksyl, who promises them their dreams - for a price. And he makes very convincing arguments the price is well worth the realization of their dreams. The most chilling aspect of this story, for me, was how convincing Skeksyl was - which makes this a cautionary tale for adults as well as for children.
Children, of course, are less gullible than adults, and so they save the day, but not before a few quite suspenseful moments. A final word of caution I give: you'll never again look at toy balloons in quite the same way.
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More lighthearted and less spooky is another debut novel, Christopher Pennell's "The Mysterious Woods of Whistle Root". Booklist offers it up as being "in the vein of E.B. White", and after reading it, I realize the last time I read either "Charlotte's Web" or "Stuart Little" , I was a child, which has probably been far too long considering I still remember the story lines if not the details, and still remember being enchanted by them.
Carly Bean Bitters has never been able to sleep at night, and her parents and multiple doctors never could figure out why. She's now an orphan being raised by her aunt who takes care of her temporal needs but largely ignores her. Her teachers don't understand her and have little patience with her falling asleep every day (she has no difficulty whatsoever sleeping during the day.) And she has no friends. Spending her evenings alone reading and drinking hot tea, she often hears music being played, but can never see who is playing it, nor who is leaving vegetables on the rooftops of the town of Whistle Root.
One moonlit night a rat with a violin asks her if she can play the horn. Carly learns that it is the rats playing the music and leaving the vegetables behind as the owls, who used to dance to their music, suddenly start snatching away the rat musicians one by one. Soon her rat, Lewis, is the only musician left. With Lewis, and an unexpected friend in her schoolmate Green, she learns the history of the town of Whistle Root, the history of the Whistle Root trees (so named for their uniquely shaped roots which can produce a shrill whistle), and the dark creature responsible for the change of behavior in the owls and the disappearance of the trees. And some surprising things about her own history.
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All three are fairly quick reads yet enjoyable enough to be rereads.
