4.5 A lot of negative reviews seem to focus on Amanda’s lack of likability. To me that just signals a lack of empathy in a person’s reading. Maybe even a little bit of wanting portrayals of children to be rose-tinted rather than realistic. I like reading about characters who make mistakes, characters who sometimes deal with their feelings poorly, etc, not only in middle grade books, but maybe especially in middle grade books. Being a kid is hard, and everything is more intense, there are a lot m...

When I discovered Shirley Jackson's work, a few years back, I had the unique experience of wanting to find her ghost somewhere and coax her back to my house for visits.Let me clarify: I did not wish to raise her from the dead and sit with her, and learn from her (a natural feeling I have, with several beloved authors). No, more specifically: I wanted to hang out with her ghost.Was this because Shirley Jackson's work leaned toward the supernatural? I don't know. Probably. All I know is that I am

This is a Lemony Snicket-recommended book. I overheard him and his neighbor discussing it in Poison for Breakfast. After I figured out its title and author, I became even more interested because I’d loved The Velvet Room as a child.This book, too, is one I would’ve read and enjoyed as an adolescent, and I’m not positive I hadn’t, as its resolution seemed vaguely familiar. In that time period (early 70's) I read so many books from the library, I can’t remember them all. Master Snicket says this b...

I was 12 when I first picked up this book, I had just move hundreds of miles away from my home to a new school new step family and knew nobody. Honestly I only desided to read it because the two main characters were David and Amanda. David and Amanda were the names of 2 cousins I missed very much. But after that it was the story that carried it, it was the very first book I read completely and then read again. I fell in love with the characters as well as the author. At the time 1989 I could on...

The four Stanley children - David, Janie, Esther and Blair - are fascinated by their new stepsister Amanda in The Headless Cupid, drawn by her claims to be a practitioner of the occult. When Amanda offers to teach the children about the supernatural world, the “ordeals” she arranges to test them seem mostly aimed at antagonizing her own mother Molly, whom she blames for her parents’ divorce. But when David and Amanda discover that their house was once believed to have a poltergeist, and Amanda h...

I hadn't read this book in a hundred years, and suddenly thought to read it aloud to the kids! They loved it, and got really into figuring out if there was a poltergeist or if Amanda was just playing pranks. Spooky without being too scary, even for my 6yo.

I remember seeing “Poltergeist” in the theater when I was ten, and it terrified me. I especially recall the scene in which the guy starts ripping his own face off. I think I screamed at the top of my lungs through that entire scene, covering my eyes with my hands but peeking every second or two to see if it ended. My sister, 6, was also screaming and wailing. (Funny story: my sister was a blubbering mess of tears by the end of the movie, which elicited a lot of disapproving and horrible stares t...

Children deal with living in a haunted house. When I was a kid, this was an unbearably spooky book.

At one of the library's booksales, I picked up a bunch of books that I liked or were super-popular when I was in elementary school. This is the first one I've actually read, and it was fun to indulge the nostalgia. While resolution at the end was a little too quick, I thought, the rest of it was still good!

Excellent.

I loved Zilpha Keatley Snyder as a child and I was curious to see if her books stand up. I'm also re-reading lots of my childhood favourites, and analyzing them and paying more attention to how stories are told.This book stood up well. It was well written and had a great plot and was still creepy. I plan to read more of Zilpha's books. I loved them.There's only one section of the book that didn't stand up and that's a section where the characters were playing slave drivers and slaves. I can't pi...

The Headless Cupid exists in the same eerie world as Phyllis Reynolds Naylor's Witch books Witch's Sister and The Ghost Next Door or Lois Duncan's Summer of Fear (The Children of Green Knowe has this flavor as well, only more gothic and less suspenseful). Snyder was one of the masters of the craft of children's literature; The Headless Cupid continues to hold up really well. It's deliciously slow, and like the best suspense and ghost stories, tricky. She uses David, her main character, and his

One of the rare books that I loved as a kid that still holds up upon reading as an adult. David's new step-mom has a daughter, Amanda, who is quite taken with the occult and also not terribly pleased with being moved to the country to live with her new family. Amanda decides to make the kids her "neophytes" and initiate them into magic and spells. However, a real supernatural occurrence is more than she, or anyone, bargained for. I never knew when I was a kid that this was the first in a series

I read many Zilpha Keatley Snyder stories in my youth. The Greensky books were life-changing for me, but I also really loved The Changeling. I never did read The Headless Cupid, however—until now.The pacing is very leisurely. We meet good-hearted David and his three younger siblings, who are all distinct, charming personalities. We learn that David’s mother died some time ago, that his dad remarried and now they’ve moved to a huge old house out in the country, and that his stepmother’s daughter

A recently blended family getting to know one another. A resentful girl with an interest in the occult. Amusing little kids. A big, old house.I think what marks this out as a novel of the 70s is that the kids have all summer pretty much on their own. They're expected to appear for meals, but none of them has any playdates, or scheduled activities, nor do they have other kids around to play with. Just a long, empty summer to get into trouble. It's a fun book, less creepy than amusing in their eff...

I read this as a young girl and loved it and recently read it again to my children and loved it even more. My 15 year old son even commented on how he liked the way she did the characters--one of the big reasons I like it so much too. It is a great read-a-loud for many ages--I read it to all my kids. The three year old didn't get into it but from ages 6-15 they were spellbound.

Found this when I was looking for a book for Miles - I loved this book when I was a kid. Guess what, I still like it! Good writing, good messages, and a poltergeist storyline to hold interest.

One of my favorite books when I was younger, any fan of ghost stories or paranormal mysteries should really enjoy this.David Stanley tries his hardest to play the ultimate big brother to his three very different young siblings. With their mother dead, and their father often away working and preparing for remarriage, he is the one they look up to. But David is about to have problems of his own, arriving in the form of his new stepsister, Amanda. And Amanda brings more than the usual problems. She...

As an adult reader, I didn't find as much mystery in this one as a child might; however, I am still stunned by Zilpha Keatley Snyder's uncanny ability to capture the minds and behavior of children. Her characters are so real. I especially loved talkative Janie, who gets physically ill after not talking for 24 hours and who loves being scared so much her "best day ever" was the day she almost got hit by a car. This line amused me greatly: "The kids were running around the lawn in their bathing su...

I really wasn’t sure what I was getting into with this book. Was it a paranormal thing, was it a cute story about children learning how to live together as a mixed family? Each description spun it differently, so I started the book confused as to what I was supposed to think about it. This book centers on David, the oldest of the Stanley children. Amanda comes to live with them, and he finds her interesting. She studies the occult and witchcraft and takes the Stanley children as her apprentices,...