FANTASTIC FRIDAY: A Small Zombie Problem/The Haunting of Henry Davis
ABOUT THE BOOK
In his fiction debut--and the start of a new series--celebrated illustrator K.G. Campbell brings a touch of Tim Burton to this singularly strange and wonderful story about a lonely boy whose life is about to get a whole lot more complicated when a zombie follows him home.
August DuPont has spent his whole life inside a dilapidated house with his aunt Hydrangea. His lonely existence ends abruptly with the arrival of an invitation to meet an aunt--and cousins--he didn't even know existed. When Aunt Orchid suggests that August attend school with his cousins, it's a dream come true. But August has scarcely begun to celebrate his reversal of fortune when he is confronted by a small problem on his way home. So begins an adventure filled with a wild child, a zombie, a fabled white alligator, and an unimaginable family secret.
REVIEW
I have rather mixed feelings about this book. I did immediately feel empathy for August, who as the story opens has been stuck inside his aunt's house his entire life because of a rather weird phenomenon. And yet, the characters were rather too odd for my taste, and the zombie details were rather gross (an eyeball kept getting thrown around). The story is certainly a unique one, with August eventually befriending the zombie girl following him around. It's clear though from the moment that August meets his other aunt, Aunt Orchid, that she's trying to use him to get something she wants from his home and I felt bad for him that he didn't know enough about people to see it. And his cousins aren't exactly likable. And the white alligator is just puzzling as it doesn't really play much of a role as of yet. I'm assuming that it probably will late in the series. I think what it comes down to is that this isn't really my kind of story. The description above mentions Tim Burton and I am not a fan of his work either, so maybe that explains why I didn't like this as much as I'd hoped when I picked it up. But if you know a reader who enjoys Tim Burton kinds of strange stories, they may very well like this one.
ABOUT THE BOOK
Ghosts only haunt when they've left something behind...
When Henry Davis moves into the neighborhood, Barbara Anne and her classmates at Washington Carver Elementary don't know what to make of him. He's pale, small, odd. For curious Barbara Anne, Henry's also a riddle--a boy who sits alone at recess sketching in a mysterious notebook, a boy, she soon learns, who's being haunted by a ghost named Edgar.
With the help of some new friends, this unlikely duo is off on an adventure to discover who Edgar was while alive and why he's haunting Henry now. Together, they might just help Edgar find what he needs to finally be at peace.
REVIEW
The Haunting of Henry Davis ended up going in a direction that I didn't expect. I guess I was expecting it to be scarier than it ended up being. While the book didn't end up being too scary, I did find it an interesting read. Barbara Anne as a narrator was amusing with her bossy tendencies. I enjoyed the characters, Barbara Anne, Henry, Zack, and Renee. It was also interesting to have a secondary character be the one being haunted instead of the main character (Barbara Anne in this case). But it made Barbara Anne's bossiness stand out all the more as she pushed Henry to follow her lead in trying to figure out why Edgar is haunting him. Unfortunately for all four kids, Barbara Anne's ideas were often rather disastrous. But the inclusion of the historical elements created a bit of a mystery that I found interesting. I'm not sure how interesting young readers will find it, but I enjoyed it. The pranks that Edgar kept pulling on poor Henry as well as the sickness that Henry struggled with led me to think that things were heading in a different direction than they ended up going. That was a nice surprise because I figured out a lot of things fairly early in the story (although young readers without a strong history background probably won't). However, that surprising turn at the end makes the ending less exciting than it could have been. The story, rather than being scary, turns out to focus on the ups and downs of friendship, which makes for an interesting read but not a scary one. I wasn't real comfortable with all the things that Barbara Anne did, such as using a ouija board, but the author doesn't make a big deal out of it. A fun read for students who like ghost stories that aren't so scary.
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