Story Time (by Edward Bloor)

But there's a lot more going on here than meets the eye, including haunted books, a visit by the First Lady, advanced military weapons, revisionist history, lethal town politics, and an unexplained series of injuries and deaths. It's a school with a lot going on, almost none of it educational.

No one would ever accuse Edward Bloor of writing ordinary stories. Here, though, his scattershot technique works less well, as the supernatural, broad, and very black humor simply overwhelms the main plot -- and the point.

The flap copy refers primarily to the story about the school and testing, so readers may be disappointed that there's so little about it, though some may enjoy the supernatural shenanigans. But even those seem at times to make little sense, the humor is often too broad to be really funny, and the author often seems to be flailing around, trying to figure out where to go. The subject of standardized testing would seem like a rich literary vein to mine, but, alas, Bloor goes off at a tangent, and never seems to make it back.