Book Review: Closed for the Season by Mary Downing Hahn

Closed for the Season
by Mary Downing Hahn
Non-series

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN-10: 0-547-39853-0
ISBN-13: 978-0-547-39853-2
Publication Date: September, 2010
List Price: $5.99

Review: Imagine being in a horrifying, abandoned, ancient amusement park on full moon night. Closed For the Season by Mary Downing Hahn is a spine tingling story for people who like a spooky juvenile abstruse mystery. Seventh grade Logan Forbes thinks his dad will buy a good house and that he will get to have a fresh start, but he doesn’t know the worst of it. A murder was committed in that house! This novel is an amazing spooky page turner but sometimes you might not want to turn the page!

Logan sees his new house and almost faints. The house is old, and run-down, with paint peeling and flaking. When Logan meets his new neighbor, Arthur Jenkins, he tells him something that almost makes Logan run away from his new house. He tells Logan that a murder was committed in his new house! Now Logan wants to know everything about the murder and why it was committed. One day Logan and Arthur gather all the information and find out that the money that the murderers were looking for was hidden in the Magic Forest. They don’t know that they are being followed by strangers on their way home and get captured and have to give all their information related to the murder away. They can only come up with one solution, which is to sneak out at night and go to the Magic Forest before the money falls into the wrong hands. Now it is a race to get to the money first.

Out of all the Mary Downing Hahn books I have read, this is the best one yet. She has succeeded in writing another scary page turner that will make you have nightmares. The book is filled with details that help you imagine the whole book in your head like a phenomenal movie. This mystery is a great suspenseful book because you won’t know who is going to live and who is going to die until you read all 182 pages. Something I like most about the book is that as the story goes on, you can tell how Logan and Arthurs relationship changes on many different levels. This book is like a rollercoaster that will take you through friendship, forgiveness, love, and last but not least, the horrors of a real crime. This book also shows you that people aren’t always who you think. This book is great for kids in middle school because the main characters are about their age. Another thing I like about Closed For the Season that many books don’t do is that it gets amazingly interesting right from the first chapter so you won’t ever be bored while reading. Things happen so fast in this book that you won’t want to ever stop reading. The ending of the book is fantastic but you will have to read the book to find out what it is. To conclude, Closed For the Season by Mary Downing Hahn is a great entertaining book that contains a whole lot of excitement throughout the story. After reading this book you might want to read all the other books by Mary Downing Hahn because she is a great author. But don’t forget . . . only read in the daylight so you don’t get too scared.

Review written by Ravi (6th grade student).

We would like to thank Houghton Mifflin Harcourt for providing a copy of Closed for the Season for this review.

Have you read Closed for the Season? How would you rate it?