by Jane Yolen and Adam Stemple
ages: 10+
First sentence: “The piper caught sight of the river long before the sound of rushing water reached his ears or the salt smell of blood struck his nose.”
Support your local independent bookstore: buy it there!
Review copy sent to me by Corinne, so I can participate in her library’s awesome program.

Callie (short for Calcephony; because of ridiculously lame parents: that’s not even a real word!) wants to be a world-class journalist. So when she snags an assignment to cover the band Brass Rat (they’ve been around since her parents were in college; and yet they don’t look a day over 20), she’s incredibly excited. That is, until she starts seeing and hearing weird things… like rats dancing whenever the lead singer/flautist (can a rock band have a flautist? Really?) Peter Gringas plays.

Callie doesn’t think anything of it, though, until the next night, Halloween, when all the children go missing. It turns out that Peter is a cursed prince of faerie in exile, paying a blood teind to his father for the murder of his brother. It’s up to Callie, if she wants to save her brother and the rest of the children, to figure out how to break the curse. Before midnight. Can she do it? (Need I ask?)

I generally love fairy tale retellings, but this one was clunky. (With a capital clunk.) Maybe it’s the fairy tale: the Pied Piper isn’t one for sweeping grand retellings. (Though I did like Wild Magic well enough.) But, even so, the writing was uneven. The was split in two: reminiscences from faerie and the modern day Callie. The reminiscences were beautiful, lyrical; I could have read a whole book about how Gringas became dissatisfied and eventually killed his brother and was exiled. The rest was mundane, pedantic, and a sad attempt at being hip and cool (or so I thought; I’m not the world’s best judge). The whole thing was a bit rushed, as well: lots and lots of set-up and a quick, and not very satisfying (though logical), resolution at the end.

It seemed to me, that there was a good YA (or even adult) story in here, and they just simplified it for younger kids, rather than making something wholly organic for middle grade readers. Which is just frustrating.

The library program, however, is really quite cool.