POISON APPLE Series

The Poison Apple series is a supernatural companion to the Candy Apple series. Young tween/early teen girls are the protagonists and they face a variety of supernatural mysteries from ghosts to vampires to werewolves. The first eight books came out from May 2010-November 2011. The first two Rotten Apple books, also supernatural but with a zombie theme, came out in August 2012. Unbeknownst to me, Poison Apple also returned with The Ghoul Next Door in October 2012 and The Ghost of Christmas Past in November. The Green-Eyed Monster followed in January 2013, but the twelfth book, Dead in the Water, didn't release until April 2014. September 2014 brought the third anf fourth Rotten Apple books, which I think are the last of this oddly stretched out run of Candy Apple spinoffs.

Spoilers below! Since these books are mysteries, if you plan on reading any and want to avoid spoilers, stop reading here.

I'll talk about Rotten Apple in a separate post, because I haven't started them yet. I just finished the twelfth Poison Apple. Mostly, I enjoyed these stories. Some of them are typical ghost stories, like The Dead End, Curiosity Killed the Cat, and The Ghost of Christmas Past. I think Christmas Past is the best of the trio, because the prank-loving ghost was a bit different, although I really enjoyed Curiosity, too. This Totally Bites and At First Bite are companions of sorts. The first follows a girl who's convinced she's a vampire, but she turns out not to be, and it's the popular spoiled girl in her class who actually is. At First Bite picks up with the popular girl dealing with her newly-acquired vampire status, a move across the country, and a mystery involving a "Dark" vampire who actually preys on humans. Both of these are good. I prefer the storyline of the second, but the protagonist of the first. Miss Fortune is interesting, because it's a bad luck curse, but the story is kinda boring. Bad luck mishaps kinda bore me, I guess. Now You See Me is another ghost story, but it's centered around a haunted camera and it's very well-written. The characters are all engaging. It was easily my favorite of the first eight books when I read them the first time and it still is. Midnight Howl is werewolves and Her Evil Twin is unique because the girl is being haunted by her old imaginary friend, not an actual ghost. The Ghoul Next Door feels like a ghost story, but it's actually out of body experience, so that made it work better. I liked that one a lot. The Green-Eyed Monster is a possessed necklace from the Salem Witch Trials days. It's pretty good. Dead in the Water, the twelfth book, blows all the others away though. It's got a very different theme based on Norwegian folklore and that really makes it stand out. Definitely my favorite of the entire series.

If you're looking for some fun supernatural mysteries that actually ARE supernatural and not just explained away, check these out.

Andrew Lang Fairy Books

Andrew Lang's twelve "color" fairy books are some of the most well-known fairy tale anthologies in the world. Lang collected tales from more sources than almost anyone else and many of the stories appear for the first time in English in his collections, translated by his wife and others.

The books were aimed at children, so these aren't the darkest, grittiest versions of the stories. However, as they range in original publication from 1889-1910, expect terms that were used in those times to be present.

I've been reading these books for years and am finally one away from having all twelve. They're not something I pursue actively, having had many of them sitting in my "to read" pile for years. I read the first four quickly, but the fifth is the one I'm still missing, and I got only partway through the next volume I'd picked up before putting them down and not picking them up again until today.

I received the Crimson and Brown books from Paperback Swap today, so I decided to finally get these books read! This is one of the few reviews you'll see on here that happens when I haven't even finished all the books, but I've read enough of these that I can praise the range of tales and the gorgeous illustrations. If you're a fairy tale fan, you should be reading these.

And if you want to read them in order, though you don't have to, the order of publication is: Blue, Red, Green, Yellow, Pink, Grey, Violet, Crimson, Brown, Orange, Olive and Lilac.

Lang also wrote many other anthologies, but these are the first ones I'm tackling. Maybe I'll do others eventually, but maybe not.

CANDY APPLE SERIES

The Candy Apple series was published by Scholastic from January 2007 to April 2011. The four year run produced thirty books by sixteen different authors, some working in pairs.

The books are aimed at tween readers with the female protagonists mostly being eleven, twelve and thirteen years old. Unfortunately, there's not a lot of diversity here. Only one book has a black main character, while a couple others have black best friends in the cast. Two books feature Hispanic main characters with a few more in the friend cast. But that's it.

I recently reread the entire series, because I'm about to put it into storage and I wanted to reread them before they go. I'll be following up this post with another on the Poison Apple and Rotten Apple series, both of which have a similar style of writing, but with supernatural elements thrown in.

Most of the Candy Apple books are stand alones, but there are three series within the series.

Miss Popularity, Miss Popularity Goes Camping, and Miss Popularity and the Best Friend Disaster follow Cassie Knight, a dynamic redhead who moves from Texas to Maine and experiences some amusing culture shock. Her best friend Etoile is one of my fave characters from the entire Candy Apple series. The author, Francesco Sedita, sadly has not written many other books.

Lisa Papademetriou's Accidentally series is my favorite from the whole set of thirty. There are four books: Accidentally Fabulous, Accidentally Famous, Accidentally Fooled, and Accidentally Friends. These books have the strongest cast of characters and I think Papademetriou's the strongest writer of the bunch. She wrote a few of the Disney Fairies chapter books I love, so I might be a tad biased though.

The summer-themed trilogy of Wish You Were Here, Liza; See You Soon, Samantha; and Miss You, Mina was written by three different authors, but the books link all three friends together as they go on their separate summer vacation adventures. Liza's is my favorite of this trilogy with Mina's in close second. Samantha's is the weakest of the four and also moderately annoying to me, because she's randomly chosen "goth" as her new look after turning twelve, but she hasn't a single clue what goth actually is.

These three series are the best of the bunch, I think, as well as Papademetriou's other contributions. I did also enjoy The Accidental Cheerleader, Juicy Gossip (by Spacepop author Erin Downing), and Winner Takes All.

Check out Candy Apple if you want some fun, but pretty predictable, quick reads.