MMGM- Blather, More Tales to Keep You Up at Night, AND Stinetinglers

It's

Marvelous Middle Grade Monday
 at 

Always in the Middle 

and #IMWAYR day 

at 

Unleashing Readers

Happy New Year! I'm writing this two weeks from the end of the 2022-23 school year, but this is posting on the day before we have students return. I love the beginning of the school year! Checking out all of those books. But the end of the school year? Not my favorite. Inventory. Mourning lost books. Shutting everything down. 2022-23 was perhaps the least pleasant of my 25 year teaching career, so I am looking forward to a better year this year!

I got permission from Picky Reader (here after the 2009 Ellen Potter interview!) to post about her May 27th wedding. It was a beautiful day, and everything went very well. She and Picky Partner put so much work into choosing the venue, the catering, and especially the music, which included a lot of older songs so that the guests would enjoy them. 

Her colors were green and yellow, but her attendants wore green, and yellow disagrees with me, so I found a gray dress for $6 at the thrift store. It was sparkly, like Barton's Glitter Everywhere.

Nell's necklace was a ring of my mother's, and I had on my mother's pearls and my grandmother's opal ring. Two of my cousins who came and I all wore the rings our aunts gave us for graduation, and my aunt Skyped in! Several of my friends came from some distance as well. 

My favorite moment was at the rehearsal, when they asked Picky Partner's dad to give him away! I had two good friends who helped me set up, and one took the leftovers back home. It was a good day, and they are very happy.

But back to books! 

These two titles are both something I will purchase, but they are both short story collections that are fantastical and scary in nature. Since I struggle with all of that, I'm going to just give impressions of these instead of detailed reviews. Sometimes, we just do what we can. 

Poblocki, Dan. More Tales to Keep You Up at Night
August 15, 2023 by Penguin Workshop
E ARC provided by Edelweiss Plus

Gilbert's brother Ant has been injured, and when Gilbert goes to the hospital to visit him, he sees a shadowy figure dart into the restroom, but when he looks for the person, finds a bag of cassette tapes and a player. Gilbert's been warned not to listen to the tapes, but he does. The tapes seem to change reality, and cause bad things to happen. They are somehow connected to the Bowen family from Tales to Keep You Up at Night, and also to a man who was employing Ant. Will Gilbert be able to save his brother?

Like Nance's Daemon Hall or White's Nightbooks, this is a story within a story. It's all deeply creepy, but I didn't pay enough attention to how all of the stories worked together. Poblocki's work is popular in my library, and it doesn't hurt that these books are right across the aisle from Schwartz's perennially popular Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark. I personally prefer his The Ghosthunter's Daughter or The Ghost of Graylock, but both of these story collections  will be a good fit for upper elementary AND middle school students, whereas the aforementioned books might be a bit much for fifth graders. 

Stine, R.L. Stinetinglers 2

August 29, 2023 by Feiwel Friends

E ARC provided by Edelweiss Plus

The thing that I liked best about the first Stinetinglers book was that Mr. Stine prefaced each story with what inspired the tale. While I have collections of short stories edited by Stine (Fear, Nightmare Hour, Scream and Scream Again), it was good to see some original stories. It's circulated well, and I know that my students will also look forward to this one, even though I'm not as big a fan of this cover, which has a very 1990s vibe to it, maybe on purpose. Great stories for fans of this author as well as Lubar's Weenies story collections. I know just the student who will want to check this out first!