Young Adult Revisited

Todd Wilkins is moving to Vermont! Yeah, don’t get your panties in a twist because he’ll be back in a few books. He and Liz have a long talk and decide that they’ll stay together because neither can face being away from each other. Everyone, including their parents, Enid and Jessica think that they’re crazy. Jess decides that the best thing to do is involve Nicholas Morrow in everything because god knows he hasn’t been through the ringer with Liz! Anyway, they spend the last week together and then he leaves. They share a tearful goodbye and then Liz spends the whole time moping over him. Jess goes to Mr. Collins for help and he assigns Liz an article on the boat regatta. Nicholas calls and asks her to go with him and watch him race, at the urging of Jess and Liz agrees, as long as they remain friends. Liz actually ends up having a great time with him, but she feels uncomfortable when Bruce shows up and starts talking about her and Todd. She feels even worse when Nicholas asks her t...

Our favorite pre-teens apparently have a great-aunt Helen, who’s never mentioned before or after this book. She just inherited a fancy/old hotel from an old friend and requests that the kids come and help her clean up. She even lets Steven bring Joe Howell along for help and she’s also invited their other cousins Robin and Stacey. Steven and Joe have been playing a bunch of tricks on the girls, trying to make them believe in ghosts. Jess always falls for it, but Liz is never fooled. The boys get to clean out the old boathouse, while the girls work on the attic. Liz finds an old diary and it’s the diary of her aunt’s old friend. She was born in the house, but moved away as a young girl and refused to go back. Jessica meets a worker named Bill, who keeps popping up and giving everyone advice. When she finds a bunch of old clothes, he points out that one of the pieces is a wedding bonnet and has a sad look on his face. Weird things start happening and most of it is centered on the t...

Stacey and Robert are out on a tennis date and sitting together, just relaxing. Suddenly Andi shows up, one of the girls from his old group. She starts telling him a story about another friend and he cracks up. Then another friend Shelia turns up and Stacey starts to feel left out. The girls want Robert to play with them, but he opts out because of her and she thinks that he really wanted to play. They go back to her house and play a computer game together. The phone rings and it’s Mrs. Walker from New York City. She wants Stacey to sit for Henry and Grace for a week, while she gets ready for a gallery show. Stacey agrees, but Robert seems kind of put off because it’s their last week together before school starts. She promises him that they’ll have lots of time together before she goes. Things don’t go the way she planned though. Robert starts acting shifty and nervous. She calls him one day and his sister said he went to play basketball with some friends. She goes to the court a...

Luc y is the type of girl that Stine loves: cute and sweet, but loves scary stuff and has a dark side. She loves teasing her little brother, making up stories about monsters sneaking around. When the book opens, she’s telling him a story about toe bitters, monsters that eat your toes. He gets all freaked out and her mom yells at her for tormenting him again. Luckily her best friend Aaron shows up and she convinces him that there’s a monster in the tree. He doesn’t believe her, but she gets so freaked out that it rubs off on him. She tells him that she’s going to sneak up and try to scare it. She knocks something out of the tree and Aaron freaks out, until he realizes that it’s just a bird’s nest. It’s summer and she’s in a reading program at the local library. The library is in an old, scary house and she has to go once a week and meet Mr. Mortman, the librarian. He assigns her a book, she has a week to read it and then she has to answer a question on it. He gives her the next bo...

Brooke and Zeke are best friends, who love horror movies. When their teacher Ms. Walker announces the school play will be scary, they both audition and land starring roles in the play, called The Phantom. One of their classmates Tina resents Brooke for getting the starring role and makes rude comments about the origins of the play. That’s when the teacher decides to tell them the true story of the play. When the school was first built, someone found a copy of a play called The Phantom. They decided to perform it with the kids and even built a trapdoor in the stage. The boy playing the Phantom mysteriously disappeared and supposedly the play was cursed. They destroyed all copies of it, except for one and their class is the first to put it on. Just then, someone runs in dressed as a monster and scares the crap out of everyone, but it was just Zeke being an ass. Zeke convinces Brooke to break into the school with him and check out the trapdoor, even though their teacher warns everyo...

I didn’t intend to recap two books in a row that featured Buddy Barrett. It just so happened that I started reading this one right after the last one, mainly because I remembered bits and pieces of this one. Mrs. Pike makes a tuna casserole for Stacey and her mom, figuring that they don’t have time to cook and unpack at the same time. Mallory runs it over and finds Claudia there. They take some stuff upstairs and find a bunch of stuff there. Both girls fall in love with a locked trunk and Mrs. McGill lets them have it. Claudia lets Mallory keep it, since her house is closer. The triplets help her take it home, but get bored because it’s locked up. It drives everyone crazy, but she doesn’t want to open it because it will ruin the trunk. Eventually she decides to let the triplets break the lock and they find that it’s mainly full of clothes. She does find a diary/journal in the bottom and decides to read through it. The journal belongs to a 12-year-old girl named Sophie, who once ...