That’s what everyone’s been telling them anyway. Molly and Kip are driving a fish cart, pulled by a horse named Galileo, to their deaths. Here we have a book that ostensibly gives us an old-fashioned tale worthy of Edgar Allan Poe, but that steeps it in a serious and thought provoking discussion of the roles of both lies and stories when you’re facing difficulties in your life. I hope I’m not giving too much away by saying that. Long story short this novel is Little Shop of Horrors meets The Secret Garden. Auxier took his whimsy, pulled out a long sharp stick, and stabbed it repeatedly in the heart and left it to die in the snow so as to give us a sublimely horrific little novel. A relatively new middle grade author, still young in the field, reading this book it’s hard to reconcile it with Auxier's previous novel Peter Nimble and His Fantastic Eyes. And though none would contest the fact that they are creepy, only Jonathan Auxier’s The Night Gardener has had the chutzpah to actually write, “A Scary Story” on its title pages as a kind of thoughtful dare. Fantasy in particular has been steeped in a kind of thoughtful darkness, from The Glass Sentence and The Thickety to The Riverman and Twelve Minutes to Midnight with varying levels of success. For whatever reason, 2014 is a dark year in children’s middle grade fiction.
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