cover image Witch at the Door

Witch at the Door

Holly Warriner. Aladdin Paperbacks, $3.99 (144pp) ISBN 978-0-689-81899-8

Given the title of this debut volume in the Spell Casters series, there is no question about the nature of the green-eyed girl who appears at Sally's ramshackle Victorian home in St. Louis one night during a violent storm. Suspense and subtlety, in fact, are in somewhat short supply throughout; however, the plot is spirited and both the characterizations and the prose are more polished than typically on offer from a paperback series. An orphan who has been living with her overbearing grandmother in Salem, Mass., Lucinda is searching for her aunt, who, it emerges, had been squatting at the house before Sally's family purchased it. The items in the girl's tattered suitcase--a mysterious book and a crystal pitcher--tip off Sally that Lucinda may be no ordinary 11-year-old. And she becomes all the more suspicious when her guest cleans up the breakfast dishes in a split second and, with a wave and a whistle reminiscent of a renowned TV witch's twitching nose, brings on well-deserved humiliation to a bullying, snobby classmate of Sally's. After Lucinda lets her new friend in on her secret, the two track down the young witch's missing aunt, who agrees that Lucinda can live with Sally and her parents (conveniently, they had been trying to adopt a child). Thus Warriner sets the stage for subsequent installments in a series that promises to conjure up light, quick-moving tales--and to please fans of that newly famous TV witch, Sabrina. Ages 8-12. (Sept.)