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The Pickle King (2009)

by Rebecca Promitzer(Favorite Author)

3.54 of 5 Votes: 4

ISBN

1906427011 (ISBN13: 9781906427016)

languge

English

genre

Paranormal Fantasy

publisher

Chicken House

review 1: The town of Elbow is known for its rainy summers. Daily rain. Constant rain. The kind of rain that makes moldy toes seem normal. That's why everyone who can leaves for the summer. Bea has nowhere to go, but she dreams of sunny Florida. Then her summer takes a turn for the creepy, when she and her best friend Sam find a dead body in the flooded basement of an old house--a body missing one of its eyeballs.Soon they are on the trail of the mystery, along with a few other kids from school who are also enduring the summer in Elbow. This one was definitely darker than your run-of-the-mill juvenile book. Sort of a Frankenstein for kids. Plenty of loose body parts showing up in unexpected places, trash people who live under the city dump, and ghostly presences, among other thing... mores. The friendship and banter between the kids was the best part. The rest didn't do much for me.
review 2: Initially, the title and front cover of this book is what attracted me to it and then when I read the inside cover and found out the story was about the murder of a local prominant buisness man I I knew it was the book for me.I was excited to start a good YA murder mystery, but I found the actual mystery to be kind of weak. It wasn't that the plot wasn't well thought out or that the writing was poor, but what first attracted me to the book didn't have that much to do with the story. I thought the story would have more to do with information about Herman, The Pickle King of Elbow, the town where the story is set. Instead it was focused more around his ghost helping the main character, an 11-year old girl named Bea, figure out why he was killed. I couldn't tell if the story was supposed to be realistic fiction because it dealt with the serious issues of Bea's father's death due to alcoholism and also had a supporting character close to Bea who smoked cigarettes when he could, or if it was supposed to be funny because all the residents of the town developed a green mold in between their toes from all the summer rain. I felt the story was a little confused as to whether it was supposed to be a scary semi-serious mystery or if it was leaning more towards an obviously goofy kids mystery. There are characters that live in (and yes I meant to type in, as in inside/underneath) the city garbage dump that are referred to as Swamp People and the kids in the novel also find a clue inside stolen human intestines. Some of this stuff seems a little gross and unbelievable for a mystery but I have to keep reminding myself that this book was meant for the 11 to 13 year old crowd. While this book was interesting enough to keep me reading until the end, I wasn't so enthralled that I couldn't put it down, which is what I prefer from any mystery story. Overall, I like this book enough to recommend reading it if you have a long car trip ahead of you, but I wouldn't put it in the category of quality reading. less

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