The Grimmelings
by Rachael King
Intermediate, Middle School    McElderry    288 pp.
10/25    9781665984225    $18.99

Ella lives with her mother, younger sister Fiona, and Scottish grandmother Grizzly on a farm in New Zealand, where they run a horse-trekking business. An unfamiliar black horse appears in the first sentence of this story, and from that point onward chaos and terror are released into their lives. A classmate disappears. The weather gets dramatic. The townspeople, already a bit mistrustful of this household of four women, pull even further away. The magpies are behaving oddly. Grizzly starts voicing gnomic Scottish warnings, and Fiona seems to be constructing odd little charms of feather and bone. Tension builds through King’s use of an atmospheric landscape, Scottish-dialect words that lend strangeness to this crisply realized world, and the gradual reveal that the black horse is a malevolent kelpie (the water horse of Scottish folklore). The practicalities of horse trekking, with its chores and annoying customers, give readers brief, down-to-earth breaks from the aura of looming disaster, but nothing can prevent the malevolent spirit from attempting to reenact his ancient narrative in a new place, on a new generation. The writing is taut and intense, tackling high stakes with a memorable setting and a cast of believable characters, both adult and child, in the tradition of Susan Cooper.

From the January/February 2026 issue of The Horn Book Magazine.