Ravenous Things
Ravenous Things
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Walt Disney Press/Hyperion
Annotation: In this stunning debut, author Derrick Chow reenvisions the tale of the Pied Piper. Both terrifying and hauntingly beaut... more
Genre: [Horror fiction]
 
Reviews: 2
Catalog Number: #319164
Format: Publisher's Hardcover
Copyright Date: 2022
Edition Date: 2022 Release Date: 07/26/22
Pages: 325 pages
ISBN: 1-368-07763-3
ISBN 13: 978-1-368-07763-7
Dewey: Fic
LCCN: 2021027091
Dimensions: 22 cm
Language: English
Reviews:
Kirkus Reviews

A boy and his new friends fight back against a creepy conspiracy.Twelve-year-old Reggie Wong is angry all the time. His dad is dead, his paranoid mom won't leave the apartment, and he gets picked on a lot by a classmate. When a strange man tells him that he can have his greatest wish, Reggie, who is cued as Chinese Canadian, jumps on the chance despite possessing a healthy amount of skepticism. He and hordes of other Toronto children (including Chantal, a precocious, brown-skinned Quebecois girl who peppers her speech with French, and his nemesis Gareth, a White boy who turns out to be more sensitive than Reggie had expected) are lured underground on a train by the Conductor. They get to interact with robot versions of their lost loved ones, while on the surface, they are replaced by humanoid rats. The three youths come up with a plan to fight back against this twisted Pied Piper, and in doing so, they find themselves. The story itself is interesting, fast-paced, and full of middle-grade–appropriate horror, both supernatural and familiar. The prose gets distracting, however, with its many jarring flourishes-the Conductor's grating speech is overwhelmingly punctuated with words like ratty-tatties, nummy-nibblies, splickity-lickity, and gumbledy-green-and never quite hits either an authentically youthful voice or an atmospherically unsettling description of the events, but most young readers will look past these faults and focus on the adventure.Lots of weird appeal. (Horror. 8-12)

Publishers Weekly (Fri Oct 06 00:00:00 CDT 2023)

A modern-day Pied Piper entices hundreds of children onto a midnight train in Chow’s chilling debut. Two years after his father’s death and his mother’s increasing disappearance into conspiracies, Reggie Wong, a 12-year-old cued as of Chinese descent, feels generally frustrated. But when a flute-playing, conductor-clad man in Toronto’s St. Patrick Station promises Reggie his heart’s desire from a subway ride, he—along with scores of other children—hops aboard the careening train. Among the other passengers are Quebecois Chantal Pelletier, a French-speaking girl with brown skin, and Reggie’s arch-nemesis Gareth Flanagan, who reads as white. But Reggie’s joyous reunion with his father becomes a horror-filled scene as Reggie realizes the truth: the children’s promised loved ones are roach-filled facsimiles designed to relive one memorable moment. And the Conductor is meanwhile transforming his beloved rats into humanoid rodents, then substituting them for the children above. Racing against a twisted time stream, Reggie and unlikely allies must thwart the Conductor’s nefarious scheme. Lessons of loss and acceptance intertwine with age-appropriate horror to create an occasionally convoluted, adventure-forward novel that unevenly blends changeling legends with the Pied Piper of Hamelin. Ages 8–12. Agent: Thao Le, Sandra Dijkstra Literary. (July)

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Kirkus Reviews
Publishers Weekly (Fri Oct 06 00:00:00 CDT 2023)
Reading Level: 4.0
Interest Level: 4-7

In this stunning debut, author Derrick Chow reenvisions the tale of the Pied Piper. Both terrifying and hauntingly beautiful, Chow masterfully uses literal and figurative monsters to explore the themes of grief and how we handle loss.

Climb aboard the midnight train! Things wondrous and terrible await you...

Twelve-year-old Reggie Wong has a quick temper that’s always getting him into trouble at school, while at home his mom struggles to get out of bed--let alone leave their apartment. That’s why Reggie desperately needs his dad back. One problem: His dad is dead.

Enter the Conductor, a peculiar man who promises to make Reggie’s wish to see his father just one more time come true. All he must do is climb aboard the man’s subway train, which leaves St. Patrick Station promptly at midnight. Desperate to have his dad and happy family back, Reggie takes him up on the offer, only to discover the train is filled with other children who have lost a loved one, just like him. As he speeds through the wild, uncharted tunnels beneath the city, Reggie meets Chantal, an annoyingly peppy girl obsessed with lists and psychiatry, and Gareth, his arch-nemesis and bully since the fourth grade. As each kid steps off the train and into the arms of their lost family member, Reggie can’t believe his impossible wish is about to come true.

But when Reggie comes to the end of the line and sees his father waiting for him, he soon discovers all is not as it seems. He and his unlikely new friends have been ensnared in a deadly trap. Together, the three must find a way to foil the Conductor’s diabolical plot and find their way out of the underground subway where horrors worse than they have ever imagined lurk around every corner. The rats of St. Patrick Station have taken over and they’re absolutely ravenous.


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