“ Skeleton Tree is the story of a 12-year-old main character who literally has a skeleton begin to grow in his backyard, and as older readers will recognize right away, and probably younger readers too, it’s not just your average skeleton, but it’s symbolic of what’s happening to his family. “Both deal with loss in a different way,” Ventrella said. Again, if you’re reading it and it is too much, you can just put it down, but if you’re able to keep reading it, it will give you a new vocabulary and a new way of understanding something difficult like death so hopefully when you face it in the real world, it will actually be easier for you and you’ll be able to deal with it in a more capable way than you would have if you’d never had the experience of reading the book.”īone Hollow is Ventrella’s follow-up to her first published novel, 2017’s Skeleton Tree, which also discussed death but approached the topic from a different angle. “It does affect people of all ages, even if it’s just losing a pet, which is something that happens to probably most people when they’re young,” Ventrella said, “but it’s nice if you have a way to understand that, which is what a book gives you. Ventrella’s latest novel Bone Hollow, recommended for children in third through seventh grades and published by Scholastic Press, for example, explores death. They’re also a great entrée into a more difficult topic so that you can kind of explore some of those difficult real-life issues within a fantasy world or some kind of fantastical spooky environment.” … Scary books are always one of the most popular books that kids are looking for because they like to be scared within the safe space of a book, which is nice because then you can be scared whenever you want to be, and if it gets too scary, you can just put it down and decide to stop reading.
“I figured being a librarian would be a good job to have along the way since it’s really hard to be able to support yourself as an author,” Ventrella said, “and you’re surrounded by books and get to see the types of books that kids are reading. Working as a librarian, Oklahoma City author Kim Ventrella saw how often children want to be frightened.
Oklahoma City-based author Kim Ventrella writes spooky books for children in grades 3-7.
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