August 8, 2022
A modern-day Pied Piper entices hundreds of children onto a midnight train in Chow’s chilling debut. Two years after his father’s death and his mother’s increasing disappearance into conspiracies, Reggie Wong, a 12-year-old cued as of Chinese descent, feels generally frustrated. But when a flute-playing, conductor-clad man in Toronto’s St. Patrick Station promises Reggie his heart’s desire from a subway ride, he—along with scores of other children—hops aboard the careening train. Among the other passengers are Quebecois Chantal Pelletier, a French-speaking girl with brown skin, and Reggie’s arch-nemesis Gareth Flanagan, who reads as white. But Reggie’s joyous reunion with his father becomes a horror-filled scene as Reggie realizes the truth: the children’s promised loved ones are roach-filled facsimiles designed to relive one memorable moment. And the Conductor is meanwhile transforming his beloved rats into humanoid rodents, then substituting them for the children above. Racing against a twisted time stream, Reggie and unlikely allies must thwart the Conductor’s nefarious scheme. Lessons of loss and acceptance intertwine with age-appropriate horror to create an occasionally convoluted, adventure-forward novel that unevenly blends changeling legends with the Pied Piper of Hamelin. Ages 8–12. Agent: Thao Le, Sandra Dijkstra Literary.
May 15, 2022
A boy and his new friends fight back against a creepy conspiracy. Twelve-year-old Reggie Wong is angry all the time. His dad is dead, his paranoid mom won't leave the apartment, and he gets picked on a lot by a classmate. When a strange man tells him that he can have his greatest wish, Reggie, who is cued as Chinese Canadian, jumps on the chance despite possessing a healthy amount of skepticism. He and hordes of other Toronto children (including Chantal, a precocious, brown-skinned Quebecois girl who peppers her speech with French, and his nemesis Gareth, a White boy who turns out to be more sensitive than Reggie had expected) are lured underground on a train by the Conductor. They get to interact with robot versions of their lost loved ones, while on the surface, they are replaced by humanoid rats. The three youths come up with a plan to fight back against this twisted Pied Piper, and in doing so, they find themselves. The story itself is interesting, fast-paced, and full of middle-grade-appropriate horror, both supernatural and familiar. The prose gets distracting, however, with its many jarring flourishes--the Conductor's grating speech is overwhelmingly punctuated with words like ratty-tatties, nummy-nibblies, splickity-lickity, and gumbledy-green--and never quite hits either an authentically youthful voice or an atmospherically unsettling description of the events, but most young readers will look past these faults and focus on the adventure. Lots of weird appeal. (Horror. 8-12)
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