Summary [courtesy of Goodreads]: Twelve-year-old Eleanor has just moved to Eden Eld to live with her aunt and uncle after her mother was killed in a fire. Her birthday, which falls on Halloween, is just around the corner, and she hopes that this year will be a fresh start at a new life. But then one morning, an ancient grandfather clock counting down thirteen hours appears outside of her bedroom. And then she spots a large black dog with glowing red eyes prowling the grounds of her school. A book of fairytales she’s never heard of almost willingly drops in front of her, as if asking to be read. Something is wrong in the town of Eden Eld. Eleanor and her new classmates, Pip and Otto, are the only ones who see these “wrong things,” and they also all happen to share a Halloween birthday. Bonded by these odd similarities, the trio uncovers a centuries-old pact the town has with a mysterious figure known as Mr. January: every thirteen years, three thirteen-year-olds disappear, sacrificed in exchange for the town’s unending good fortune. This Halloween, Mr. January is back to collect his payment and Eleanor, Pip, and Otto are to be his next offering…unless they can break the curse before the clock strikes thirteen.
This is the perfect not-too-scary-but-still-pretty-damn-scary book for spooky season. Kate Alice Marshall can fucking write (one day I’ll get around to reviewing her amazing YA books, Rules for Vanishing and Our Last Echoes), and her middle grade debut is SO GOOD.
The characters are all great and fully developed, and whiteness is never just the default–EVERY character’s race is mentioned in their descriptions, and while 2 of the main trio are white, 1 is Black.
Here, Marshall’s choice to have our main character Eleanor relocate to a “haunted” house filled with staircases to nowhere and secret passages, on the outskirts of a creepy small town, are so fun and make for such compelling reading. (I mean, it helps that haunted houses and small-town-horror are my absolute FAVORITE subgenres, so…)
If you’ve read Katherine Arden’s Small Spaces series, you’re almost guaranteed to love Marshall’s work (and stay tuned for my review of her newly released sequel Brackenbeast soon). The authors are friends, and while you can see Arden’s influence here, Thirteens is definitely its own beast (and, imo, the more the merrier when it comes to truly spooky rural middle grade horror).
SPOILER TERRITORY
As an added bonus, this book connects in tangentially to Marshall’s flagship YA series, which means they all take place in the same cosmic-horror-fighting world, which is thrilling. I LOVE the ever-expanding mythology of these books, and finding easter-egg style nods to the older series was a true delight. (For instance, when Eleanor is doing research about small towns and children disappearing, the town in Rules for Vanishing is given a brief mention).
I also loved how some of the adults–even parents–in this were truly evil, and the kids had to come to grips with that fact fairly quickly. It gave a realistic twist and some heightened stakes to a supernatural tale.
Also, if I can continue to gush, I ADORED the fact that as soon as Eleanor finds her childhood book of fairy tales and realizes it will guide them in fighting the evil in their town, she STAYS UP LATE AND READS IT MULTIPLE TIMES. That very night. She doesn’t wait; she doesn’t pace it out, reading it one story at a time for weeks (cough Edie in Between cough, a book I otherwise loved). I HATE it when otherwise ‘clever’ characters ignore central sources of information just so major plot points can be withheld for a long enough number of pages. Hate it. So tedious. So I LOVED the way this book got straight to the point but still managed to have plenty of fun twists and reveals.
Can’t wait to read the newly released Brackenbeast and find out if it’s the end of the series of if we’ll get more from the world of Eden Eld.