The Cavendish Home for Boys and Girls

cottoncandyfluf - The Cavendish home for boys and girls is a truly creepy and sinister book. But that's not a bad thing. This book is great for reading when you're looking for something to really give you a scare! The books protagonist, Victoria, is quite different to all your other book heroines. She won't do with nonsense and is always striving for success. So when she is faced with the most ridiculous situations, she finds them hard to believe. Even so, she won't give up trying to save her best friend Lawrence. Throughout the book, you feel Victoria developing not just as a character, but a real person. The adventure she goes on changes her for the better. This book is popular not only with the middle grade audience, but with adults too! To sum this all up, it's a brilliant book that needs to be read with an English accent.

October 22, 2012
The too-serene-to-be-true town of Belleville harbors some creepy secrets in Legrand's debut, a sinister and occasionally playful tale of suspense. Twelve-year-old perfectionist Victoria Wright has bouncy curls, a fixation on achieving straight As, and just one friendâunkempt, artistic Lawrence, who she considers her "personal project." But when Lawrence disappears, and Victoria launches an investigation to find him, she discovers more frightening trouble than she imagined. Victoria unravels the mystery behind the titular home for children, which is run by the ageless Mrs. Cavendish and a fiendish gardener/assistant. Hair-raising adventures involving slimy hidden passageways, pinching swarms of cockroaches, mystery meat, and the wrath of cruel Mrs. Cavendish fill the pages. Legrand gives Victoria's mission a prickly energy, and her descriptions of the sighing, heaving homeâa character in itselfâare the stuff of bad dreams. Watts's b&w illustrations of spindly characters, cryptic shadows, and cramped corridors amplify the unsettling ambiance, and her roach motif may have readers checking their arms. Ages 10âup. Agent: Diana Fox, Fox Literary.

December 1, 2012

Gr 5-8-A paradigm of perfection-with straight As, gleaming blond curls, and an unshakable sense of purpose-12-year-old Victoria expects everything and everyone to be just so. Friends are particularly messy, so she has opted to have only one. Lawrence is a disheveled, music-loving dreamer whom she views as a "personal project" in need of fixing. When Lawrence goes missing, Victoria investigates and soon unearths dreadful secrets lurking beneath the surface of her picture-perfect community. The adults are behaving oddly, numerous children have disappeared, and nasty creepy-crawlies are popping up everywhere. Victoria's sleuthing leads her to the local orphanage and into the flawlessly manicured grasps of Mrs. Cavendish, the malevolent, magic-using headmistress who snatches less-than-perfect children from their homes and reforms them through a nightmare-inducing regime of physical and psychological punishments. Once Victoria uncovers the awful truth, she must face her own greatest fears-and also learn to reach out to others-to save the day. Beginning with the uneasy realization that things are not quite right, gradually incorporating disquieting discoveries, and escalating into full-out horror (the children are fed chopped-up body-part casseroles), the suspense and sense of dread build to the satisfying (and also unsettling) conclusion. Shadow-filled black-and-white illustrations and the occasional bug scampering across the text intensify the eeriness. Insidiously creepy, searingly sinister, and spine-tinglingly fun, this book also presents a powerful message about friendship and the value of individuality.-Joy Fleishhacker, School Library Journal

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