Book: The Puppet’s Payback
By: Mary Downing Hahn
Published: September 21, 2020
Publisher: Clarion Books
Genre: Middle grade horror
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About The Puppet’s Payback
Every single story in The Puppet’s Payback follows a young character as they embrase something scary. With tons of ghosts in the stories that are actually somewhat nice and some that just want to be left alone. There’s a story for just about every kid out there.
What I thought
I’m going to start off by saying that I know that I’m not the target audience for The Puppet’s Payback. Usually, books for a younger audience don’t typically bother me, and good chance I’ll like them anyway. Well, that really wasn’t the case for The Puppet’s Payback.
Honestly, I’m kind of wondering why the book is called what it is, especially since there are no puppets in any of the stories. At least there aren’t any from what I remember at the time of writing this review. So that means one of two things. One the puppet had a minor part. Or two the story really wasn’t that memorable in the first place and I just wound up forgetting about it.
Most of the stories had a great concept but fell kind of flat at the end. Most of them don’t have the shock factor that I feel the author was going for. At least I feel like she was trying to add a bit of a shock factor, but then they wound up falling flat for me.
With that being said, I did find some of the endings kind of confusing. Not that I didn’t understand what was happening, but it’s one of those what was the point of things. It would end very dully, and I would question the whole story. In some of the stories, the kids don’t act their age and seem to be much older than they are. Then, certain characters aren’t exactly the brightest kids because they should have known that something was wrong.
There are some stories in here that seemed pretty good, and the characters were actually done right. They had some creepy aspects to it, but overall, I feel like with the way the stories ended, they just weren’t all that great.
It makes me a bit sad because this book seemed promising and creepy. I was pretty excited to read it when I bought it.
If you like this post then you maybe you’ll find a book you’ll like in this post about middle grade horror books.