From School Library Journal
Grade 3-5. The key elements of this zany story include a teacher who loves country music, Grandma's Baked Goods and Auto Repair Shop, woolly mammoth ghosts, a baby Indian elephant, a recent immigrant from India, and a Vermont setting. Miss Earth's fourth-grade students are divided along gender lines as to whether ghosts really exist. In an effort to prove themselves superior, the girls, members of the Tattletales club, set out to scare the boys, the Copycats club, by creating a story of six beauticians who died while touring the area. Luring the Copycats to the scene of the accident, the Tattletales scare them by using old clothes, wigs, and talcum powder. Meanwhile, the Copycats discover a herd of woolly mammoth ghosts that is searching for a lost baby. In a creative plot twist, the boys, aided by Pearl Hotchkiss who refuses to join either club, help the mammoths and get revenge on the girls. With a true understanding of fourth graders, the author creates believable characters. The dialogue is hilarious and reads aloud well. While the plot is complex because of all the characters, situations, and details, it flows nicely. The book features the same cast as Maguire's Seven Spiders Spinning (Houghton, 1994) but stands independently. Although the jacket art is less appealing, this title is bound to be as popular as Louis Sachar's Sideways Stories from Wayside School (Random, 1990).?Molly S. Kinney, Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to the
Hardcover
edition.
From Kirkus Reviews
Having survived an influx of giant, poisonous Siberian snow spiders (Seven Spiders Spinning, 1994), the rival boys and girls of Miss Earth's class in Hamlet, Vermont, face another set of prehistoric critters: a herd of ghost mammoths hunting through the centuries for a misplaced youngling. In the wake of a classroom argument about the existence of ghosts, the Tattletales (girls) gleefully don fright masks and beehive wigs (`` `There is nothing quite so terrifying as hairstyles that have gone out of fashion' '') and send the Copycats (boys) fleeing down spooky Hardscrabble Hill in panic, where there are actual ghosts--indistinct mounds that appear at the first sign of peanuts and wander about with a mournful air. With the help of the new boy, Salim Bannerjee, a newly deceased pet mouse named Jeremiah Bullfrog, plus lots of chocolate donuts from the local bakery-cum-auto repair shop, the Copycats divine the source of the mammoths' unhappiness; they ease it with a handy baby elephant ghost that has followed Salim all the way from the Bombay Zoo. Then, using many cans of hair spray, they give the obliging pachyderms new hairstyles to turn the tables on the Tattletales. Maguire's wit sometimes slips its leash, but the climax is sidesplitting and the gender rivalry thoroughly skewered, although the heartwarming ectoplasmic adoption scene prompts a Thanksgiving Day truce between the factions. (b&w illustrations, not seen) (Fiction. 10-12) --
Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
--This text refers to the
Hardcover
edition.
