Amity by Micol Ostow

Plagiarism: taking someone else's work or ideas and passing them off as one's own.

Changing the setting from New York to New Hampshire or Northern Massachusetts and changing the killers from fathers to eldest brothers but using every other detail from an actual event which was then made into a movie...AND NOT EVEN SAYING "HEY THANKS" BUT INSTEAD CLAIMING YOU CAME UP WITH THE STORY AFTER VISITING A HAUNTED HOUSE?????????????

THIS IS 100% PLAGIARIZED!

I am considering removing this from our collection.  I'm mad I even ordered it.  

Please Google Amityville Horror and read the NUMEROUS sources about this real murder, possessed home, and adaptations.  I THOUGHT that's what I'd be reading: an updated version of the story for my kids' age (cell phones, TV, the internet...), but instead found the slight changes to the story annoying.  Imagine then reading the author's acknowledgements and finding her claim this is an ORIGINAL STORY!  That's a flat out lie.

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All opinions expressed on this blog solely those of Mrs. W. 

The Dead Girls of Hysteria Hall by Katie Alexander

Several students are absolutely obsessed with Alexander's Bad Girls series. This is another of her books that I pulled for our Haunted Halloween display.  I decided to read it based on my students' recommendation.

I hate to say I didn't really care for it.

Delia inherits a house from her great-aunt, also named Delia.  Her parents intend to fix it up and sell it.  She learns the home was once an insane asylum for women and has a dark history of patient death.  Not long after arriving, Delia apparently commits suicide by jumping out a window.  Delia spends the next few years meeting the assorted female ghosts while her sister Jane researches the home and its history.  I won't spoil the climax when Jane returns to avenge her sister's death.

There are several stories/movies/books of houses with souls (mostly evil ones): The Haunting, A Haunting in Connecticut, Amityville and all its incarnations (one of which I plan to read later....).  There are also numerous tales of those trying to avenge the death of a sibling and the new generation being the only ones who can vanquish the evil old.  There was nothing really new about this; it felt like a hodge-podge of already used story lines.

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Sleeping Beauties by Stephen and Owen King

I love Stephen King and have read every single one of his books. I think somewhere, beneath the Trump bashing (which I'm OK with) and gun-owner hate (which I'm NOT OK with), there is a good story here.  But I'm too turned off to actually search for it.

One day all the women of the world fail to wake from their sleep.  They become enshrouded in a web-like material the instant they fall asleep.  Many women try to stay awake as long as possible, but very few will be able to stay awake through the ordeal.

The setting is a rural town where everybody knows everybody else.  A woman's prison lies on the outskirts and is the employer for many of the characters (most others being inmates or local police).  It seems there is a wide range of economic status in the town, from homelessness to affluence.  A woman arrives to town just as the sleeping sickness, dubbed Aurora after Disney's Sleeping Beauty, arrives.  She calls herself Evie and immediately murders two meth dealers. 

Taken to the women's prison, she never forms a cocoon when she falls asleep.  She also seems to have other superpowers, including being able to talk to the prison rats.  Not long after all the other women of the world are asleep, two factions form.  Those who would start burning women in their sleep and seizing Evie and those who will protect both.

Meanwhile the sleeping women are transported to another world, similar to their old one in setting, though nature has retaken much of it.  There are no men, except the male babies who are being born.

Spoiler Alert: in the end, the women must decide whether to stay in Utopia or go back to a world of (Trump loving, gun toting, violent, etc.) men.

I'd like to state, for the record, that all men are not bad.  I'm married to a good one.  And not all of us gun owners are bad.  I promise you that. 

If this was the first book I'd ever read by King, I'd never read another.

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All opinions expressed on this blog are solely those of Mrs. W.