Making the Monster: The Science Behind Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein by Kathryn Harkup
The Screaming Staircase (Lockwood & Co. #1) by Jonathan Stroud
Thornhill by Pam Smy
A Land of Permanent Goodbyes by Atia Abawi
Steal This Country: A Handbook for Resistance, Persistence, and Fixing Almost Everything by Alexandra Styron
I chose spooky books for Halloween week!
Monday, I shared Thornhill by Pam Smy
Tuesday, Halloween, I went witchy, with The Apprentice Witch by James Nicol.
Wednesday, I talked about Neil Gaiman’s eerie The Ocean at the End of the Lane.
Friday is the end of the quarter, and a day without students so we can write progress reports. That meant that my last book talk was on Thursday, when I talked about How to Catch a Bogle by Catherine Jinks.
I make no apologies to my students. I tell them straight up that I don’t like scary stories because they give me nightmares. I am not such a weenie that I eschew all books that are potentially scary books. I can read a book until it crosses a creepy line that is complicated to explain in words. It is a gut feeling and a sense of where a book is going.
I read and added Thornhill by Pam Smy to my classroom library. It is potentially scary, but I got through it well enough. The book is half text, half illustrations. To be honest, the scariest bits are told through the black and white illustrations, so I could look quickly and move on. I haven’t book talked it, and yet the book has been checked out several times. There is a audience for scary books.
Publisher’s Summary: Parallel stories set in different times, one told in prose and one in pictures, converge as a girl unravels the mystery of the abandoned Thornhill Institute next door.
1982: Mary is a lonely orphan at the Thornhill Institute For Children at the very moment that it’s shutting its doors. When her few friends are all adopted or re-homed and she’s left to face a volatile bully alone, her revenge will have a lasting effect on the bully, on Mary, and on Thornhill itself.
2017: Ella has just moved to a new town where she knows no one. From her room on the top floor of her new home, she has a perfect view of the dilapidated, abandoned Thornhill Institute across the way, where she glimpses a girl in the window. Determined to befriend the girl and solidify the link between them, Ella resolves to unravel Thornhill’s shadowy past.
Told in alternating, interwoven plotlines—Mary’s through intimate diary entries and Ella’s in bold, striking art—Pam Smy’s Thornhill is a haunting exploration of human connection, filled with suspense.
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