The Weirdies

Spun off from the first two episodes of an audio original, this distinctly Lemony Snicket--style gothic features three 10-year-old siblings who would fit right into the Addams Family, a kindly social worker willing to overlook the kids' fondness for explosives and other peccadilloes in order to adopt them, and their thoroughly demonic parents, who are (incorrectly) thought to be dead. Barnacle Weirdie and his sisters, Melancholy and Garlic, exude roguish charm in the cover illustration but are more like destructive forces of nature in the story. Growing up in a huge mansion with servants to brush their teeth, dress them, and even chew their meat, the three are later plucked from the Our Lady of the Perpetual Side-Eye orphanage by the relentlessly loving Miss Emily. The children are swept up in a custody battle when their ruthless birth mom and dad unexpectedly reappear with a fiendish plan to exploit them to restore the family fortunes. Readers who delight in macabre details, savagely caricatured grown-ups, and plucky young folk coping with unfortunate events will be tickled.

Three children seek acceptance and love through peculiar means. Ten-year-old triplets Barnacle, Melancholy, and Garlic "decided to be as weird as possible" to get the attention and affection of their rich, eccentric, and neglectful parents. When this ploy fails and their parents abandon them, they push away their adoptive mother, Miss Emily, so she can't disappoint them, too. But sunny Miss Emily refuses to give up--even when the kids' biological parents, Mr. Weirdie and the Enchantress, return to claim them as part of a scheme to get their hands on more money. The parents are terrible, and the children have a taste for destruction and violence. They're also impossibly odd: Barnacle doesn't have a skeleton, Melancholy collects "bones and teeth and the occasional ear," and Garlic naps with ticks and poison oak. The book contains two stories--"In Which Misery Rains Down on Innocent People" and "In Which Tragedy Runs Amok"--and the ending of the second one feels unsatisfying and designed to set up a sequel. The plot is fairly simple, and the characters lack depth; the narrator speaks directly to readers, but much of the humor is likely to sail over younger audiences' heads. The Mad Libs--esque weirdness is the whole point, but it comes across as window dressing, overpowering the messages about trust, love, and fitting in. The Weirdies are "so white you [can] almost see through them," and Emily is cued white. Final art not seen. All weird whimsy but little heart.(Fiction. 8-12) Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.