Skary Childrin and the Carousel of Sorrow by Katy Towell

This was an impulse borrow and read and a good example of why I like the library so much. A book catches your eye, you read it, and while it’s enjoyable, it’s a good thing you didn’t actually buy it (because for me, buying books = will reread in future).

Skary Childrin follows three girls (and one boy). There’s Adelaide, who is supposed to look like a werewolf but that isn’t really obvious in the illustrations. She has really keen senses though. And then there’s Maggie, who’s very quiet and spend a lot of the book being grumpy. Then there’s Beatrice, who’s the youngest and can see ghosts. She’s the sweetest character of the lot but the way she’s drawn made me think of a Black Eyed Child (maybe that was the inspiration?)

The three children are students at Madame Gertrude’s School for Girls and pretty much feared and hated by everyone. In a town that was cursed 12 years ago, anyone that’s different automatically gets the side-eye (or worse). But one day, a new librarian named Miss Delia comes to town. The girls and Miss Delia get off to a good start but Miss Delia mysteriously disappears. Desperate to find the one teacher who was kind to them, the girls enlist the help of Steffen and realise that Miss Delia’s disappearance may be connected to a string of disappearances happening around town.

What I liked the book was basically the concept. A town where the weird and strange exists sounded interestingly scary and I thought the three girls sounded like fitting protagonists (they were).

The mystery was also pretty decent - the girls’ narrative was interspersed with scenes of people disappearing after riding a mysterious carousel and that was enough to keep me reading until the end. It turns out that I managed to pinpoint the villain the minute he appeared, but I didn’t figure out the motive until the end.

Interspersed with the story are scenes that look to be pencil drawings. They’re pretty childish in style, so maybe it’s supposed to be one of the girls’ drawings? I thought it was a nice complement to the story.

What I wasn’t so enthusiastic about was the narrative style. It reads like a third person limited but it was hard to figure out who the POV character was (or if it was just skipping around the whole time), which hindered the suspension of disbelief. And like I mentioned before, the villain was pretty easy to identify, mostly because the majority of the book has them trapped at school rather than doing much investigating.

Overall, this is a pretty fun book for readers (the target audience are probably people way younger than me) who like spooky stuff that isn’t horror.