Now Entering Addamsville

July 15, 2019
Her family has been a target of slurs--"trailer dogs," "rednecks"--but she may still save the town. Eighteen-year-old Zora Novak is down two parents and two fingers, living in a trailer on the town outskirts with her sister, Sadie, because their mom's missing and father's in jail. Deceptively quaint Addamsville, Indiana, relies on a thriving ghost-tourism industry, although Zora's the only person who can see the departed. But the ghosts (thankfully gloomy, not gruesome) are restless, and there's a shape-shifting, ghost-eating firestarter on the loose, destroying property and possibly possessing people. Like a profane, brunette Buffy, Zora has a gift but needs a Scooby gang to help her save Addamsville. Reluctantly allying with reformed (maybe) firestarter Bach and insufferably perfect cousin Artemis, Zora attempts to dispatch the firestarter, sabotage a ghost-hunting TV crew, solve mysteries, survive high school...and avoid maiming, death, or serious jail time. Abrasive, defensive, and secretly sentimental, Zora doesn't let social pariahdom stand in the way of fulfilling her paranormal duties. Zappia (Eliza and Her Monsters, 2017, etc.) both invokes and subverts poverty porn, dark tourism, and small-minded small-town life in this arch look at social inequalities that doesn't skimp on supernatural spookiness, slapstick, or teenage snark. Main characters follow a white default, but there is some ethnic diversity in secondary characters. A darkly humorous, rapid-fire read in which the living are sometimes scarier than the dead. (Paranormal. 14-18)

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August 26, 2019
In this satisfyingly creepy tale, a girl capable of seeing ghosts in a small Indiana town teeming with them risks everything to hunt firestarters, malevolent spirits who possess the living and feed off the dead. Living with her sister in a trailer on the town’s outskirts after her mother disappeared and her father went to jail, Zora Novak, 18, is an outcast. After a disastrous encounter cost her two fingers and gave her a reputation as an arsonist, she turned from hunting firestarters alone to pursuing good deeds. When a new firestarter murders someone and Zora becomes a suspect, she reluctantly investigates, with the help of her cousin Artemis, an expert in the town’s spooky history. Further complicating things, a popular ghost-hunting reality show arrives up to film an episode, and Zora can’t afford for them to get in her way. Now she has to find the most dangerous firestarter of her career, one unexpectedly tied to Addamsville’s most baffling mysteries. Zappia (Eliza and her Monsters) crafts an engaging dark fantasy, expertly weaving together a small-town aesthetic and a Midwestern gothic sensibility, a complicated town history replete with grudges and ghost stories, and complex characters in a Buffy The Vampire Slayer–esque story with plenty of appeal. Ages 12–up. Agent: Louise Fury, the Bent Agency.

September 15, 2019
Grades 9-12 Addamsville, Indiana, may be Zora Novak's home, but the townspeople sure aren't her biggest fans. Her mother was the town weirdo before she disappeared, and her father was a con man who charmed half of Addamsville's residents out of their savings before he was sent to prison. But Zora, unlike her older sister, knows a little about why their mother vanished. Like her, Zora can see ghosts, and she hunts the monstrous firestarters who stalk their town. This has the downside, however, of giving Zora, who's been found near a few fires, the reputation of an arsonist. When the school janitor?one she'd fought with?dies in a house fire, everyone points the finger at Zora, and she has to join forces with her obnoxious, rich-girl cousin Artemis, the only person who knows her secret, to clear her name and find the real killer. Zappia (Eliza and Her Monsters, 2017) threads her fantasy mystery through with thoughtful sketches of class dynamics and family tensions. Like Kiersten White's Slayer (2019), this is girl power for a new era.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)