Rachel Smith's Blog: Guinea Pigs and Books, page 16

Crime by a field

105. Night Landings – Alison Prince

Harrie wakes up in the middle of the night because there’s a plane landing in their area at like 2AM. That’s not prime crop dusting time, no it is not, and that airfield is supposed to be abandoned for the most part. It is a UFO? No. I thought it would be, but I was wrong. It’s smugglers. But Harrie doesn’t know that until she meets Rick – the kid who has run away from home because the smugglers are forcing his mom to help them. Rick doesn’t want the police, he wants 12 year olds to help him, or really just feed him while he hides with Harrie’s pony Taffy. Yes, Harrie has a dog and a pony. Lucky.

Anyway, after at least one child learns the value of telling their elders about shitty smuggling plots in the airfield where no one is supposed to be, a lot of action goes down at once in the airfield with the police, the smugglers, Rick’s mom, Rick who has been kidnapped, that really quiet old man who owns where Taffy the pony stays, the crop duster, Mutty, and fire. A lot of it could have been avoided if Rick hadn’t been so cagey about telling the police smugglers were trying to use his mom for crime, but in the end they all get a trip to Amsterdam anyway. Lucky, again.

 

Pickles has a hay field, but she doesn’t have a pony or crime.

 

See?
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“Books. That’s what started the whole apocalypse.”

123. Witchery Hill – Welwyn Wilton Katz

Mike is on vacation with his dad on the island of Guernsey and they’re staying with his dad’s friend Dr. Tony, Tony’s daughter Lisa, and the stepmom Lisa hates, Janine, who is more than just a stepmonster, she’s definitely a witch according to Lisa. Their house has a nice back up to the hill upon which a prehistoric tomb sits which is also the perfect place for sabbats. Lisa is a pretty angry kid and she really wants to get rid of Janine and prove her to be a witch by staking out the sabbats and dismissing nearly everything Mike says as not listening to her or him not being worthy of the knowledge. That becomes ironic when they go to this old dude that’s into the occult’s giant mansion and find his secret room of books.

There’s a book that apparently makes someone head of the coven because it gives the owner so much power and knowledge. But of course he’s not admitting he’s head of the coven and he also has a collection of poisonous and useful for advancing the plot plants. So he has to die and that causes both Dr. Tony, who is there when he’s dying, to go a little bit sick/insane and Janine to become way more secretive and sneaky…because she’s got to be vying for head of the coven with that dude’s heir as her competition. Who can harvest all the book power the fastest? Mike tries to help Lisa figure things out when she’s not fretting over her father or telling him how he’s basically useless and he does put together a pretty interesting set of plans and activities. Overall this was a pretty entertaining story and I really enjoyed the explanation of why the book was so hard to lay hands on.

 

Snuffy has her own very important objects which are hard to lay hands on. They don’t exactly drive her insane though.

 

Also a sacred object, even if not a book and technically imaginary, Produce Madness.
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Not the usual summer job encounters

22. House of Bones – Graham Masterton

Those wacky Druids. That’s essentially the bones, pun intended, of this story. Well, the wood and bones. John gets a job after school has ended in an estate agency that’s owned by one super old, super weird dude named Mr. Vane. He has a list of properties that only he handles and one day, while John is left alone and everyone else gets lunch, some dude comes in all “the customer is always right” and gets John to give him the keys to a Mr. Vane property. It’s John’s first day, so he doesn’t know that’s absolutely not acceptable to do. Entitled dude never comes back after John tells his slightly younger than the scary one boss and John and his fellow younger folks in the office see fit to investigate a little. They find things like a really realistic wooden statue and a skull embedded in a wall and that the police found a room full of skeletons in one of Mr. Vane’s properties. Later, through the help of one former anthropology professor, they also find out all Mr. Vane’s houses are on ley lines – it’s Druids’ favorite way to move things, like giant stones to make cool henges and/or souls throughout the vastness of time.

 

Hen Wen and Salem know how to relax even with a house built on a ley line.

 

See, they’ve had a Druid infestation before. Ley lines.
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Run away from home, get possessed, make puppets – totally normal.

142. The Carver – Jenny Jones

There’s a Gareth in the garden. Well, not the garden, the copse across the field, but it’s close. Quedgley Copse, which has a connection to Gareth’s relatives, is behind Maddy’s house and she feels a connection to Gareth and his camp stove, the kind of connection that says “I’m falling in love with someone making scary puppets in a copse.” Gareth has left a scary home situation and he is now reenacting an old World War I situation that happened in the copse and also making these wooden puppets that give people splinters and are alive…”the forest people.” They invade Maddy’s house, scare nearly everyone who encounters them, and even end up in the hospital, scaring children. Maddy and her friends try to help Gareth and also quarrel a lot about Maddy helping Gareth and being so fixated on Gareth until they all have to fight wooden puppets. A fun story. It’s all fun and games until there are puppets, for sure. One puppet is described as life size and under Maddy’s bed and she does not know it’s there. Yikes city.

 

Murderface doesn’t like life-size puppets. She does like glaring and sleeping in egg pose.

 

Murderface had a lot of glaring talent and talent in general.
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“I must have my pact…”

10. The Ghost Wife – Susan Price

An old timey YA the whole way through, The Ghost Wife is very different. Usually, the young people who may or may not be trying to fall in love are from the future learning of a tragic romance in the past. In this case it’s all old and the ghost is already in a relationship and does not want to be cheated on by the living. Her attached dude is living and apparently attractive to other living people like a girl named Rattle who works in the mines nearby.

Rattle does the collier version of taking off her glasses and unleashing her ponytail by putting on her sister’s skirt and gets a nearly okay reception from Jonathon, who lives with the ghost Becca because his father was a “devil” who attached the ghost to their family as like a servant/spy. Becca is not an easily commanded ghost and she doesn’t want Rattle trying to take her man.

Rattle goes to another “devil” in the area, who plies his wares at a church for some reason and he tells her he can get rid of the ghost. So Rattle thinks the ghost will be gone and we finally meet the actual villain of the story, the “Devil” dude. It has a really weird ending, honestly, I wasn’t expecting the turn and it’s on the sad and abrupt side.

 

Wisting sees a vet instead of a devil for his needs I can’t take care of, but we haven’t come up with a ghost attached to him yet.

 

I mean, he maybe takes calls from Ghostface while Ghostwatch is on, but no other kinds of ghosts.
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“Couldn’t outwit a staple gun.”

97. The Stonewalkers – Vivien Alcock

Poppy is a liar and that seems to be her defining characteristic besides not knowing who to put her green patina bracelet she found on. Not the statue who will come to life in the garden is the answer. A girl called Emma who is in her class and a total cream puff believes Poppy about the statue, especially when she sees the footprints, and then they go in search of Belladonna, as that is who the statue is of, and find that Belladonna is sort of angry for a formerly inanimate stone and also has woken up some other statues, including one to be her boyfriend. Poppy and Emma are promptly kidnapped on the moors while searching and can’t get away effectively because Emma already twisted her ankle while trying to storm away from Poppy on her bike.

This is for young persons, like younger than YA reader young persons, and so it left something to be desired by way of an explanation for what was going on with the statues. I still don’t know. A statue wanting a boyfriend is not the clearest of motivations for stone sculpture and then they went in a mine with kidnapped children for also unclear plot reasons other than the mine being mentioned earlier. I was at least hoping for something more mystical than a bracelet and chain from a pot with decorations that look like Greek pottery…but there was no information presented to back anything.

The girls did learn a lesson being captured by statues, how to conserve orange soda in a pinch and that they both definitely love their parents even if they don’t always get along. All righty then.

 

Merricat and Peregrine know how to get out of a tight squeeze, or do they? They may know what motivates statues.

 

Something more mystical like… Thorfy in a parking lot. But! There are standing stones back there and technically the partially realized ghost of a torn down stadium where both Judas Priest and Neil Diamond played and had their parking lots documented. Legends, very mystical in their own right. Like Thorfy.
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A very important Cousin Oliver

31. Black Harvest – Ann Cheetham

This is totally a cruel summer for Colin and Prill (sister and brother) and cousin Oliver (not of the Brady Bunch variety) and Colin and Prill’s sister Alison and their mom and their dog. It seems their holiday house is cursed. Milk goes bad near instantly. So does any food that enters the house. Colin at one point wakes up surrounded by mold and they can all smell mold and other terrible smells a lot of the time. The dog’s food also seems to suddenly have maggots after looking fine when they opened the can.

There are also dead people in the yard at the holiday house, and ghosts, and Oliver finds the dead after deciding to dig a den, so he says, but he’s got some weird sense about this place and needs to dig that pit and mess with archaeology. But, he’s kind of the only person who might get to the bottom of things before they all starve on their Irish holiday, even if Colin and Prill are really only tolerating him instead of appreciating his different sensibilities.

 

Horace was a pig who appreciated all the other pigs he met. He would have been a better vacation friend for Oliver, but perhaps not the vacation in this book.

 

Horace also has a nice little vacation home with an ominous squirrel.
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“Why not? It’s too late to go boogying anyway.”

138. Transformer – Phillip Gross

It’s a band! Their new singer Alia is the weirdo at one of the band members’ girlfriend’s school, but she’s a really good singer. And she is weird. She’s taking these “classes” from this dude named Hugo who is way older and is telling her that she will be able to fly. And manipulate people. She’s got a well of magic in her soul and if they just travel to the right cave and ambush a music festival, they’ll all be successful.

First, Alia will scare everyone at the local club and basically stop eating and say a lot of weird stuff about windmills. Emod (Dome backwards because he has a big head, how nice for his lifelong nickname) is the sane one in the group who still has to hang around the group when Alia and Ben start bringing too much weird mysticism into the songs and alienating everyone else because, well, he has a van. Every band needs a van.

 

So, they need a new front person? Danger Crumples is always ready to put on a show. Ozymandias maybe has a van.

 

Danger Crumples even looks everything they need to know about legendary things up beforehand.
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There’s a pronunciation guide at the front for the Welsh names, very helpful.

47. The Haunting at Cliff House – Karleen Bradford

A Canadian 13 year old, Alison, and her father travel to Wales to stay in a house he inherited for the summer. He’ll write his novel, she’ll wander around in the cold ocean and in the one room that wasn’t cleaned before they got there, which feels extra cold both physically and emotionally.

Alison does find a cave with a cat in it that almost fills up with the tide before she can get out – and she finds the diary of Bronwen, the 13 year old who previously occupied that one room. Bronwen also lives with her father, knows about the cave, and is not very pleased when her father starts dating again, but in 1810.

Alison’s father finds the local librarian who is from the little town by their isolated inherited cliff house and…also starts dating again…so of course their parallel lives intertwine and Alison must try to undo the past ills and make the ghost better again before she goes back to Canada. It’s a really short book, so she doesn’t have much time.

 

1950s chair exploration is enough for Pammy, she doesn’t need caves.

 

Speaking of haunted houses, Of Course It’s Haunted features one and the guinea pigs who are nonplussed, worried, or running away from it – Hen Wen, Salem, Thorfy, & Snuffy.
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“She came here out of curiosity, was drugged into submission, and now she’s a witch.”

114. A Candle in her Room – Ruth M. Arthur

Several generations all cursed to some extent by one evil doll who demands to be dressed nicely and obeyed. Dido. One of three sisters found Dido in the attic and the mean oldest one takes Dido for herself, then really just leads a life of rudeness and evil. Stealing her sister’s future husband, being a total jerk, neglecting her own child… Then that child ends up tortured in World War II and has her own child, who is eventually found and brought back to the house, only to find Dido once more. Based on the title and the preponderance of Dido giving off creepy vibes, I am surprised that nothing burned down during the light witchcraft.

 

Duncan never gave off creepy vibes, but then again she didn’t have some weird doll influencing her to give them off either.

 

Snuffy looks at Folk Horror Snuffy and thinks about how if she had a doll instead of a ball, she would be just as unsettling.
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