Read at Your Own Risk
by Remy Lai; illus. by the author
Intermediate, Middle School    Holt    160 pp.
8/24    9781250323354    $13.99
e-book ed.  9781250323347    $9.99

Though others may call it “an accident…I know the word for someone who goes to science class to dissect earthworms and gets sliced in the forehead by an ­earthworm-juice-encrusted blade and has to get two stitches: CURSED.” Middle-school protagonist Hannah Lee relates in her journal all the things that have gone supernaturally wrong or been left unexplained over the course of eight days when she is “hexed by ancient evil.” Her nose keeps bleeding, her front tooth falls out (the dentist finds silverfish in her gums, shudder), her brother falls into a coma. She records each occurrence in her diary…and the malevolent spirit begins to write back. Lai’s (Ghost Book, rev. 9/23) visual style—incorporating copious, plot-furthering illustrations within the main text—is here displayed on spiral ­notebook–looking­ lined pages with spiky, sketchlike art (“by” Hannah), mostly black and white with some splotches of blood red, capturing the increasingly weird, and sometimes genuinely frightening, goings-on. Allusions to the power of storytelling and an impending author’s visit are threaded throughout, both used as foreshadowing to an attention-grabbingly eerie ending.

From the ">September/October 2024 issue of The Horn Book Magazine.