When you feel like a minor character in your own life, what does it take to become the hero of your story? How much danger and heartbreak will you endure — and are you a damsel in distress or the architect of your own fate? Two beautifully written, slightly spooky middle-grade novels ask these questions and then answer them emphatically, as their down-to-earth central characters find a way to conquer the magical and mysterious challenges ahead of them.
___
“Not Quite a Ghost” by Anne Ursu. (Ages 8-12. Walden Pond Press. $19.99.)
As the school year starts, Violet finds her life in a hopeless tangle. Middle school is starting, she’s moving into a new house … and she’s wary of spending time alone in her spooky attic room because there’s something haunting it, hidden behind the serpentine vines of the wallpaper: “This was going to be hard to explain to her parents.”
Violet’s old friendships seem to be curdling, and she is stuck in a merry-go-round of social awkwardness: a disastrous sleepover, cafeteria conflicts and — the horror! — gym class. Her response: “She might vomit. She might have a heart attack. She might vomit and have a heart attack at the same time.”
And then things get worse. When a mysterious illness colonizes her body, Violet struggles, suffers — and doubts herself, because her friends and doctors seem to think it’s all in her head.
Something spooky in the house senses her confusion and pain, and begins needling her: “They haven’t been able to find anything wrong with you, have they?”
The supernatural villain is scary, but Violet’s undiagnosed illness might be even scarier, and the parallels between a haunting no one else can see and health problems that elude doctors are painfully clear. As it turns out, Violet is stronger than that voice, and stronger than the doubters — and with a little help from new friends and a family who believe in her, she finds a way forward.
___
“Wicked Marigold” by Caroline Carlson. (Ages 8-12. Candlewick Press. $17.99.)
Princess Rosalind is so delightful that flowers spring up in her footsteps and animals become tame at her glance, and when she is kidnapped by an evil wizard, the kingdom goes into mourning.
But this is not Rosalind’s story. This is the very funny, slightly spooky, thoroughly entertaining story of her not-so-perfect sister Marigold, who comes face-to-face with that perfection when Rosalind mysteriously returns from captivity.
“Rosalind’s perfect. Rosalind doesn’t sneak through walls or clamber on rooftops, and she certainly doesn’t stomp,” Marigold laments as she stomps as hard as she can.
The answer, obviously, is that Marigold needs to balance that sweetness and light by being as wicked as she can possibly be — in other words, by presenting herself on the doorstep of the wizard who had held Rosalind and declaring herself ready for an apprenticeship in magical mayhem.
What could go wrong — other than the fact that wizard assistance is mostly housework, and she perhaps turned her wizard into a blob of goop by accident, and his friends and associates are horrible? “Of course all the clients are awful,” sighs Pettifog, the nattily dressed demon who holds the magical household together. “Who else do you think would hire an evil wizard?”
In the end, of course, Marigold figures some things out — among them, how “evil” she really is, how to make peace with a perfect sibling, how to undo a spell gone awry, and how it feels to be turned into a beetle. She does indeed find her happy-ish ending, but the great joy of this novel is in the saucily funny details of life in the service of evil (or, truthfully, in the service of the somewhat naughty), and readers will be cheering for Marigold — and wishing for a longer stay in her magical world.
Caroline Luzzatto has taught preschool and fourth grade. Reach her at luzzatto.bookworms@gmail.com
