In a suspenseful middle-grade fantasy debut evocative of Neil Gaiman's Coraline and classic films like Hayao Miyazaki's Spirited Away, Kathryn Tanquary drops a peer-pressure-prone Japanese teenager into the realm of the fantastic.
For 13-year-old Saki Yamamoto, a family summer vacation in her grandmother's remote mountain village means missing her friends back home in Tokyo... and worst of all, no cell signal. But Saki never gets the chance to be bored. She soon meets a group of "delinquent village kids" who dare Saki to ring a sacred bell at her family's ancestral graveyard shrine at night. "A death curse, her fears whispered," but Saki rings the bell anyway. Later that night, she awakens to the presence of a four-tailed fox spirit guide who tells her that, sure enough, a death curse now hangs over her family. To find someone who can combat the curse, Saki must walk in the Night Parade of spirits, or Hyakki Yagyō. She is afraid, but "[t]he forest was awake with sounds, alive and eager. It called to her, drawing her closer to the door." Over the course of three nights, Saki faces ogres, shrine guardians, a deceptively kind witch with a faceless son and many other typical denizens of Japanese mythology. Saki learns the hard way to give family and tradition their due. The magic in these lessons, however, outweighs any didacticism.
Expect this solid fantasy for tween readers to inspire interest in myth, magic and--quite likely--manga. --Jaclyn Fulwood, youth services librarian, Latah County Library District (Idaho)