by Richard Peck
ages: 9-12
First sentence: “You could see from here the house was haunted.”
Support your local independent bookstore: buy it there!

I’m not a big Richard Peck fan. Sure, I’ve read his other Grandma Dowdel books, but while I think I found them charming, I think that’s about all I found them to be. Not exactly thrilling or touching or even memorable.

That said, I really wanted to love this one. Perhaps it’s because it’s that time of year, and it’s vaguely a Christmas book. Perhaps it’s because I’ve heard so much good about Peck over the years that I wanted to see if I could figure out what I was missing.

It was a good book: charming, like I remember the others being; funny at times, poignant at others. It’s full of fun and interesting and mildly skanky characters; historical details from the 1950s, from Elvis going into the Army to the Russian scare. There’s a lovely, hilarious Christmas program and an overall moral to the story. There’s bullies and new friends, there’s adjusting to small town life by our narrator, Bobby, one of the new Methodist parson’s kids. Yet — like so often when you have expectations from a book — there was something missing. Something to make the book soar. Becky has more thoughts on that — and she hit upon much of what I was feeling.

Perhaps some of Peck’s other books are better?

(Just for the record: because this is a Cybils nominee, I’ve been asked to make sure y’all know this is my opinion only, and not that of the panel.)