Anyone scrambling for a gift for their favorite morbid tween will be set with Jen Campbell and Adam de Souza's The Sister Who Ate Her Brothers: And Other Gruesome Tales. The 14 stories of gut-spilling and digit-losing are spine-tingling, hair-raising and sometimes even rib-tickling.
For this collection, Campbell (Franklin and Luna series), a fairy tale historian, has pulled together stories from around the globe and retained their grossness. In Nigeria's "The Daughter Who Loved a Skeleton," the titular creep raids a graveyard and collects body parts so that he can transform himself into the man of a young woman's dreams. In the Inuit "The Princess Who Ruled the Sea," an ice king cuts off his daughter's fingers after he finds out that she'd rather marry her dog than any of her father-approved suitors. Although the stories generally aren't concerned with moralizing, justice does at times prevail, as does a happy ending on occasion--just ask the spouse of the "controlling husband" in El Salvador's "The Wife Who Could Remove Her Head."
Cartoonist de Souza's comics-reminiscent style does nothing to defang the book's ghoulish subject matter. The most chilling illustration in The Sister Who Ate Her Brothers, which features black-and-white vignettes and full-page color art, may be a full pager in "The Kingdoms at the Center of the Earth," from Russia: it depicts four dolls with jack-o'-lantern-like heads forcing a young woman to fall through her bedroom floor. On the bright side, the tumble may just get her out of marrying her brother. --Nell Beram, freelance writer and YA author