dining in the dark with the secret society reviews

Now that’s how you end a book-and scar an entire generation of young readers. By the time Marco resurfaces, it’s been decades… and he learns that basically his entire family has died in a car crash while he was gone. But there’s a major catch: time moves differently in this world. They tell him that he’s the chosen one, and that he must help them save both worlds by going on a quest.

(Nothing good can ever come from going to the basement!) He encounters a secret passage to a different world, one with super creepy ant-like creatures that know all about him and his sister. One day, they notice some strange lights coming from their basement, and Marco goes to investigate. In this one, Marco and Lilly are siblings who can somehow communicate telepathically. Marco’s Millions is the prequel to William Sleator’s The Boxes, but if we know anything about origin stories, it’s that they’re usually even darker than the source material. But wait, there’s more! It turns out that Janie wasn’t actually their daughter’s daughter: she had, in fact, been kidnapped by their daughter… Did every kid demand a DNA test after this, or was that just me? Fearing that one day, they might demand the baby back, Janie’s grandparents move away and change their last name. Inexplicably, one day, she shows up with baby Janie, but ultimately the call to return to the cult is too strong. Their daughter (her mother) was a troubled teen who ran away, joined a Hare Krishna-esque cult, and got married. She’s obviously incredibly disturbed by this: does this mean that her loving parents are malicious kidnappers? After discovering legal documents with different aliases in the attic, she confronts them, and they tell her that she is actually their granddaughter.

The Face on the Milk Carton starts at lunch, when Janie Johnson glances at a missing child ad on the side of a milk carton-and recognizes the face as her own. I feel like I still think a lot about the children’s books that made me ( Where the Wild Things Are, Harold and the Purple Crayon, Strega Nona, etc.) but what about the books that came after that?Ĭaroline B. Of course, finding this book description really just sent me down a whole other rabbit hole. (The book was published in 1999, but that last part is evergreen.) His community sentences him (a literal child) to death for his betrayal, there’s a “Chamber of Soft Walls” (an underground mental health facility), parts of the city explode, and in the end, it’s actually about trying to escape the corrupt mayor of New York City. The two worlds are not supposed to interact, but of course, a 14-year-old boy’s curiosity gets the best of him and mayhem ensues. They live underneath New York City, repurposing the trash of the Topsiders (people who live above ground). It tells the story of a community underground (many of our search results kept coming back The City of Ember, which was more mind-blowing than fucked up, in my opinion) called the Downsiders. One friend in particular was unable to let it go, and 12 hours later, she found it: The Downsiders by Neal Shusterman. Earlier this week, I was having a perfectly normal dinner with some friends who were in town, and I can’t remember how we got on this topic, but we ended up spending a good 30 minutes trying to track down the name of a middle grade/young adult book from our youth.

Dining in the dark with the secret society reviews