Angela Cervantes

Rafa loves making up scary stories and sharing them with friends. It’s what helped him make friends when he and sister Brianna went to live with their abuelos after their mother went to prison. On the last day of school, neighbor Ms Martin gives Rafa an unusual warning not to tell any scary stories that night because the blood moon will be out. Rafa promises, but later that night in Jayden’s treehouse he makes up a story about a boy who jumps into a pond and goes missing. From that night, strange things begin to happen: Rafa sees a ghostly boy, he begins receiving mysterious text messages, and Ms Martin shares a notebook with him that contains the same story that Rafa made up in the treehouse. As the unusual events mount and become scarier, Rafa realizes he must be the one to stop the madness. A not too scary read with moments of thrills that will suit young readers looking for something to scare but not petrify.… (mer)

{My thoughts} – Gaby is a sweet little girl that got dealt a terrible hand in life. A few years before the book starts her mom and dad split up and her dad leaves. A few months before the book starts her mother is deported back to Honduras when she goes to work on a day that she wasn’t scheduled. The place where she worked was raided and she was deported. Since her mom got sent back to Honduras that left her caregiver to be her father. He moves in with her and more or less treats her as an inconvenience. Not to mention he can’t keep a job and barely keeps food in her belly.

When her mom was deported she was originally suppose to go live with her best friend Alma and her family. However, her dad wouldn’t allow it. Instead he made her stay with him where she was hardly being cared for. Because of the way he was caring for her she was bullied and treated poorly by a number of students at school.

Gaby’s class takes on a project where they help out at a local shelter. She gets to write profiles for all the animals as a means to help them find their forever homes. While she is volunteering there with her class she becomes attached to a cat named Feather.

The majority of the book is about her time helping at the shelter and her desire to get her mom back home. I think that her helping at the shelter really helped her grow as a person with a better understanding of everything that’s going on within her life. The work that she does at the shelter seems to help her deal with all the pain from losing her mom.

I really recommend this book for any child because it’s a great book. It’s well written and given the current events taking place it really has the potential to hit home with many of the children reading it. It’s about being scared, about fear and about finding understanding in a situation that is beyond any one child’s complete understanding. I look forward to reading more books by this author in the future.… (mer)