THE PHANTOM ISLES
Stephen Alter
Bloomsbury USA Children's Books
Fantasy
Hardcover: 1582347387
Paperback: 9781599902197
224 pages

• Read an Excerpt

Middle-school students Courtney, Ming and Orion break into the Carville, Massachusetts Public Library one late spring night. Inside the library's "granite walls, cast-iron grilles, and turreted roof that made it look like a fortress," the children huddle in the cavern-like basement. Under the beam of Orion's flashlight, they recite an incantation from THE COMPLEAT NECROMANCER, an aged book written by former Carville resident Professor Hezekiah T. Osgood, who is now deceased.

Hezekiah, his wife Clara and son Nichodemus spent many years on Ilhas dos Fantasmas --- also known as Prithvideep --- an island in the middle of the Indian Ocean, south of the Equator. There, Hezekiah and his family learned about the arora --- spirits that haunted the islands.

THE COMPLEAT NECROMANCER is an ordinary-looking book, "old and heavy as a brick," which chronicles Hezekiah's investigation into the mysteries of the afterlife. According to the book, "three friends must gather in the darkness and conspire to raise the dead." After Courtney, Ming and Orion repeat the incantation, they believe nothing has happened. They scamper from the library, forgetting Orion's flashlight in their haste.

The next morning Alma Parker, the town's librarian, finds the flashlight and notices something else amiss --- and it's not just the books that are out of place. After Alma picks up a book that is also part of the Osgood collection, she sees the profile of a boy pressed between the pages. It is "a filmy, translucent layer…as if traced by air." The image moves and looks at her.

While reading in her bedroom, Courtney also discovers the image of someone moving between the pages of a book "like the pale outline of a fern that might have been pressed inside the book long ago."

Back in school, Ming and Orion are assigned to create a presentation for the Carville World's Fair social studies project. Their teacher, Mrs. Hokum, has a vendetta against Alma Parker and a long list of books she wants banned from the library. Ming and Orion select Ilhas dos Fantasmas as the country for their project. Mrs. Hokum reluctantly approves their selection, but she remains suspicious and continues her campaign to ban "negative" books from the library and remove Alma Parker as librarian.

Joining forces with Alma and her husband, Ted, the three youngsters attempt to rescue the trapped arora while trying to protect the library's books from Mrs. Hokum and her supporters.

THE PHANTOM ISLES is creative and visually appealing, with stories within stories and images of arora watermarked on its pages. Told from several points of view, including the spirits trapped within the pages of obscure texts, THE PHANTOM ISLES succeeds as an entertaining, informative and engaging novel.

   --- Reviewed by Donna Volkenannt (dvolkenannt@charter.net)

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