The Rat Queen
by Pete Hautman
Intermediate     Candlewick    400 pp.         g
10/22     978-1-5362-1858-9     $18.99

In this spooky fantasy, Annie finds a book of folktales from Litvania, her parents’ homeland, and begins reading magical stories filled with clever girls and menacing beasts. For her tenth birthday, Annie’s father gives her paper on which she is supposed to write her bad thoughts and actions and then feed the paper to the nuodeema burna , or the sin-eater, under the floorboards of her father’s study. Once she begins participating in this Litvanian tradition, she ceases to grow, and the rats that have been plaguing the neighborhood get bolder still. Sinister family secrets, such as a never-aging father and a mother who’d mysteriously disappeared, come to the surface with the hordes of vermin that take to the town. Annie must restore order to her community—and all of Litvania as well. Her adventures are bound to find an eager audience in readers who value determination and moral fortitude in the face of an increasingly confusing grown-up world. s

From the November/December 2022 issue of The Horn Book Magazine.