Thank you, HarperCollins Children’s, for providing this book for review consideration via NetGalley. All opinions are my own.

This next book was a bit of a stretch for my middle-grade reader. First of all: there’s no pictures, I mean not even an occasional illustration. Secondly, they scare easily. One look at the cover, and I knew I needed this book one way or another. Thankfully, I received an eARC, and was able to get my hands on it early!

My Thoughts on the eARC

CREEPY KID by Caleb Roehrig is a tale of growth after grief through the eyes of a “creepy kid.” Edgar Alden, also known as Poe, loves all things macabre, eight-legged, and spooky. When he loses the one person who understood him deep down, he is grief-stricken. Unsure of what his life will look like without his Grandma, they’re forced to move from her home. His family finds a fixer-upper on the other side of the tracks, in a cul-de-sac where every house looks the same. Poe is ecstatic when he discovers that his house is haunted. But will he get more than he bargained for when there turns out to be more than one ghost living inside his family’s new home?

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I got a little choked up in the beginning when Poe’s grandma dies. It felt very raw, in a good way. As the story progresses, Poe finds himself in all kinds of situations that are very familiar to those of us who were unpopular in middle school. Iykyk. There were some tense scenes that definitely pushed the thriller envelope for its audience. I thoroughly enjoyed this refreshing story—and might have pushed a little further with my dramatic reading aloud.

This is probably one of the best books I have read in a while and even though it has been two months since we closed the metaphorical cover, I can’t stop thinking about it. Roehrig definitely knew what he was doing when he was writing this book. For kids who likes more intense, thriller-adjacent books, this will be a great title for them.

In Review

I think the novel could use another round of editing. There are many instances where I was distracted by the use of parentheses and em dashes. I also found many sentences that didn’t follow the norm for sentence structure and adjective order, and found myself rereading them. If there were a lot fewer parenthesis (Seriously, why were entire paragraphs sat between this mystical punctuation?) I would have easily rated this book five stars.

Overall, CREEPY KID is an emotional story with plenty of life lessons and morals for our tween readers. My own middle-grade reader thought the ending left a strong cliffhanger and would love to see a book two in the future.