MMGM- Ghosts!

It's

Marvelous Middle Grade Monday
 at 

Always in the Middle 

and #IMWAYR day 

at 

Teach Mentor Texts 

and 

Unleashing Readers

Rissi, Anica Mrose. Hide and Don't Seek

August 3rd 2021 by HarperCollins/Quill Tree Books

E ARC provided by Edelweiss Plus

While short story collections don't circulate well in my library, SCARY short story collections do. Hide and Don't Seek is an excellent addition to titles like Schwartz's Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, Lubar's Lawn Weenies tales (which are downright chilling!), San Souci's Dare to Be Scared volumes, R.L. Stine's compilations like Fear and Beware, Scholastic's Midnight Library books, and the 2020 tribute to Schwartz, Don't Turn Out the Lights.  

Yes, I'll be glad to wait while you go add those to your list of books to purchase. 

The upside is that this book is so awesome that I even approve of the scary poems, and I am notoriously picky about anything in verse. The downside is that I find it very difficult to review short story collections. The format of this struck me as very similar to the Scary Stories books, down to the illustrations at the start of each tale, but these were much more chilling. 

Chilling in what way? That's the tough thing to put my finger on. I'd say that these all address fears I didn't even know I had, and made my stomach drop on the last paragraph. If these were told around a campfire with a flashlight strategically placed under someone's chin, the last paragraphs in most of these entries would elicit lots of shrieking and burying of heads into pillows! 

My favorite story is probably the one from the point of view of the family dog, trying to keep his child safe from the wiles of the cat. DON'T PUT THE DOG INSIDE THE GATE! KEEP HIM WITH YOU! Well, I saw that one coming, but it was still petrifying. 

I knew this author from her sweet and charming Anna Banana series, but Hide and Don't Seek proves that she has some serious horror writing chops. Just be very careful if those chops are coming from a shovel that is aimed at YOU!

Williams, Dinah. True Hauntings #2: Battlefield Ghosts

August 3rd 2021 by Scholastic Nonfiction

E ARC provided by Edelweiss Plus

Maybe my students are unusual, but when I saw this, I KNEW that it would be a worthy successor to True Hauntings: Deadly Disasters. I have long accepted that my readers love war books (and persuaded concerned parents that this is not a concerning phase) as well as killer ghost and murder books. Sometimes even the children express concern that they want to read those books, but I reassure them that it is a well-defined developmental stage. To combine the two is rather brilliant. Here's why. 

I have a friend who was one of the little war mongers, even though he is generally a kind and peaceable fellow. He was obsessed with the Civil War and WWII as a child, and even now reads weighty tomes on those conflicts. When I mentioned True Hauntings to him and asked "Would you have read this?", he replied "No, probably not." Then he launched into long descriptions of the Weird War Tales that his mother would get for a dime with the covers ripped off at the local drugstore. (He did not know that this was not quite legal!) He recounted several of these, then told me about a book his second grade teacher had given him that was somewhat similar. Clearly, these books had a big impact on him, so when he finished, I said "So you WOULD have read this book?"

With its wide variety of battles and ghosts throughout history and around the world (starting in 1185 Japan and ending in Okinawa in 1945, but heavy on US battles), this has a great formula of telling about the military conflict, giving us some good scenes, then picking up the thread of the subsequent ghost hauntings. There are a good number of illustrations and pictures included, and the print is just the right size and doesn't crowd the pages. 

I really liked that additional information needed to understand the setting is included right in the story, but there are a few sidebars as well. I also thought the tone was perfect: not too sensational, but sympathetic to the pain that war caused. It doesn't hurt that the stories end with a feeling of suspense. 

The only downside of the e edition was that the pages turned very slowly, since book design includes a lot of all black pages, or pages that look like crumpled paper. Since most readers will pick this up in paperback at a Scholastic book fair and carry it around with them until the pages really ARE crumpled, this won't matter. Follett does has this available in a prebind for library use, and I definitely have it on my list to purchase for the new school year.

Before the pandemic, I was posting my outfits for no particularly good reason. When I didn't see students in person, it was hard to get myself motivated to wear anything but jeans and sweaters. To make myself accountable, I'll post my daily outfits, unless I get complaints!

I wear a lot of skirts, mainly because I think it honors my fore mothers, who managed to accomplish a lot without ever wearing slacks! My mother, who retired in 1995 after 38 years teaching elementary school, ALWAYS wore suits or dresses with heels. 

She was a little leery of my thrift store shopping, but came to appreciate it later. She'd be pleased that this Lands End dress and Ann Taylor jacket were $3 each, and the Liz Claibourne scarf $2 years ago. The ribbon broach is from a friend, but the tiny "Y" pin is also a thrift find. Since I am now "pre-elderly", I can rock necklaces AND pins, just like the Queen!