Bound To Stay Bound

School Library Journal - 05/01/2025 Gr 4–7—In Flesh and Blood, the star of this eclectic mix of mostly horror tales, a WWII-era family takes in a young boy burned and covered in bandages, and they soon regret welcoming this guest into their home. In Freeze, a friend group is tormented by creepy snowmen conjured up by a new student. Still Water features a girl shipped off before the WWII blitz of London—think Kimberly Brubaker Bradley's The War That Saved My Life with a ghost-story twist. Monster Slayer is an accessible version of Beowulf. The text is easy to read, and the illustrations are astonishingly sophisticated. Ghost Tower seems lightly spooky at first, but morphs into one of the most frightening horrors of all—small-town politics! Its heroes must petition their local town council to save a decrepit tower that has become home to a population of bats. Super Sub is an outlier here, a straightforward soccer story with historical soccer facts between each chapter. While not horror, Lunar is a tidy little sci-fi thriller about a tween trapped on the moon after an emergency escape gone awry and includes full-page illustrations to help contextualize the text. In fact, all the books are adorned with some of the highest-quality illustrations in middle grade fiction. These books span a wide suggested age span. Lunar and Ghost Tower are appropriate for younger readers whereas even adults would enjoy this alluring edition of Beowulf. All the novels were originally published in the UK and most are set there, too. VERDICT Worthy purchases for any school or public library. - Copyright 2025 Publishers Weekly, Library Journal and/or School Library Journal used with permission.