Campfire Capers

Storm Cliff Stables

by Lisa Mullarkey, Paula Franco (Illustrations)

Avery, Bree, Esha, and Jaelyn - the Core Four are ready for the perfect summer at Storm Cliff Stables! No campfire is complete without scary stories, and Esha is convinced hers will be the best one ever. Her tale of a thieving ghost spooks everyone, so Esha starts helping the story along by becoming a thief herself. But when Avery's horseshoe necklace goes missing for real, things get out of hand. Will Esha be able to tell the truth? Will her friends ever forgive her? Aligned to Common Core standards and correlated to state standards. Calico is an imprint of Magic Wagon, a division of ABDO.

112 pages, Library Binding

First published September 1, 2014

Reviews

[Ro Menendez · Rating 2 out of 5]

Storm Cliff Stables is a series that focuses on an all-girls summer horse camp. There are two age groups: the Pony Girls which is a sub-series within this series, and the older girls, they like to call themselves The Core Four. This installment focuses on Esha, who is bossy and a one-upper, she always wants to do better than whoever is shining at the moment. Esha's one-upping the scariest campfire story told, motivates her to start taking campers' property as evidence that the ghost in her story is real, and turns into a possible expulsion from camp, when the things she's taken and hidden, disappear. The situations that the campers find themselves in this story are ones that young readers often find themselves in; borrowing without actually asking for permission, jokes that turn into pranks, discovering someone is doing something wrong and taking matters into your own hands instead of asking an adult to intervene, and not knowing when a situation has gone to far and it is time to own up to what has been done. Esha, her friends, and the adults at Storm Cliff Stables are examples of what claiming responsibility for wrongdoing looks like, of what forgiveness and friendship entails, and how it is always wise to ask for an adult's help when matters get overwhelming. One thing that was bothersome is how Esha's dialogue was constantly written using -in' instead of -ing, I assume to give the reader an idea of how Esha spoke, but the author does not use this technique in the dialogue of other characters in the series so it seems unnecessary.