Title: Wait Till Helen Comes

Author: Hahn, Mary Downing

Book Preview:

“A graveyard!” said Heather who thinks it is interesting.  Michael likes the new house because of all the bugs in the forest.  Molly on the other hand, is scared out of her pants because of the graveyard, the bugs Michael brings home, and everything else.  But when Mom and Dave trust Michael and Molly to keep an eye on their younger sister and make sure she doesn’t go in the graveyard, do they keep their promise?  Of course not!  Michael wanders off into the woods and leaves Molly all by herself to watch Heather.  So when Heather goes off out of Molly’s sight she finds a grave under an old oak tree with her initials on it, H.E.H.  So what will Heather do to the initials?  Will she take the gravestone in the house and keep it?  Or will she try to find out who is under the grave and how they died?

Rating:

My favorite character was Molly because she was always in the right place at the right time. Molly got blamed for getting into trouble when Heather should have been. Molly spies on Heather but when Heather tells mom and dad, Molly is the one who gets into trouble for spying and not Heather for going near the Harper House and the pond. There were three main characters in this book. Mary Downing Hahn makes the characters have different personalities, not the same as some other books do.

There were some exciting parts in this book. One of them is when a noise was coming closer and closer to Molly and Michael. That made me read as fast as I could so I could find out what happened. That was one of the best parts in the book, but just one good part in a book is not good enough.

Wait Till Helen Comes did not really keep my interest. It was kind of confusing. It would have kept my interest if it would have had a better plot. There were only a couple good parts in this book.

There was only one lesson taught in this book. That lesson is when Helen tried to kill Heather to stay for life with her. This taught me if I ever see something try to pull me into a dangerous place that I will recognize it.

The ending was well written. The end solved the mystery. It really made me think about the story and how Helen was mad at people.

There are a lot of things that I liked about this book. It uses creative phrases like, "The murky swamp looked like a grass clipping dying". This book also kept going back to one place. For example it would be talking about when Michael was chasing a bug, to when Molly was chasing Heather before she got into trouble. One of my favorite parts was when Michael and Molly were going back to the church when they heard a crash get louder and louder inside the house. This part made me eat my Doritos faster than I have ever eaten them.

There are also some things that I did not like about this book. One of them is that it does not explain who the people are in the beginning so you have to find out who they are in the middle of the book. It starts out telling that they lived in a normal house and Mom was married to Dave. I was saying to myself, "Who is Dave?" Then, like four chapters later, I found out who he is. And then it talked about these two girls named Molly and Heather and a boy named Michael.

Some of the things that I would have changed would be to tell who the characters were sooner in the book. One example would be when they were talking about Michael and what he likes to do. They only talked about a few things. Then in the middle of the story they talked more about him. They could have just talked about it right there instead of talking about it later in the book. I would also make the beginning more interesting. It was probably the most boring part in the whole book. I would change the parts where Michael kept saying "No". He kept saying that over and over. It made the book a little worse. I don’t know why the author did not make that better but if I was editing it I would have told her to change it. [Mike]