(3) 4-6 Secrets of the Pied Piper series. Max and her friends are back on the Summer Isle, searching for her younger brother Carter, who has teamed up with their former enemy, the Piper, to learn magic. Can they unite to defeat the evil Grannie Yaga? Cody treats Carter's mobility impairment with nuance and partially subverts the unfortunate "magical cure" from book two, bringing the trilogy to a pleasing conclusion.

Reviewer: Amy Bennett-Zendzian

(2) K-3 Adapted by Marine Tasso. Translated by Noelia Hobeika. This version of the traditional cautionary tale is set at Christmas (thus occasioning the book's red-and-green color scheme) and in 1283. The book uses its tall, narrow format effectively to convey the creepy atmosphere, most dramatically in a double-page spread of the rats converging on--and devouring--a boxful of poison that is no match for the creatures, who "savored the poison as if it were candy."

Reviewer: Roger Sutton | Horn Book Magazine Issue: November, 2016

(4) 4-6 Secrets of the Pied Piper series. Carter is still trapped in the Summer Isle with the Pied Piper; separated, big sister Max is desperate to return to Carter and the other Hamelin children. The growing cast has become unwieldy, and a magical-cure trope disrupts what began as a thoughtful depiction of Carter's mobility impairment. Nevertheless, this middle book has a clear thematic arc; each parallel narrative reaches a satisfying, dramatic resolution.

Reviewer: Amy Bennett-Zendzian

(3) 4-6 Secrets of the Pied Piper series. In this series-opener, the Pied Piper transports Max, nearly thirteen, and her brother, ten-year-old Carter, from modern-day Hamelin to the magical Summer Isle, where the stolen children of Hamelin circa 1284 have been living in endless youth. The siblings' quest to escape features thrilling encounters with both new and familiar fairy-tale faces. Cody's perceptive portrayal of Carter's mobility impairment is especially notable.

Reviewer: Amy Bennett-Zendzian

(3) K-3 Retold by Renate Raecke. Translated by Anthea Bell. Collected by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm. After the people of Hamelin refuse to pay the Pied Piper for ridding their town of rats, he takes his revenge by leading the town's children away. This eerie, faithful retelling includes exact details (the year 1284; 130 children), giving it a ring of authenticity. The sophisticated illustrations have a subdued, foreboding quality suitable for slightly older picture-book readers.

Reviewer: Lisa Catherine Findlay

(4) 4-6 Illustrated by Chris Riddell. "These rats were real badasses." This overblown retelling of the German folktale is outrageous, thought-provoking, raucous, and even veers into raunchy. An intrusive narrator addresses readers as "my darlings, my nose-pickers, my nincompoops" but urges them toward critical thinking as he describes the hedonistic dwellers of an imaginary Hamelin. Riddell's bold, full-color caricatures fit the text's tone like a glove. Glos.

Reviewer: Lisa Catherine Findlay

(2) K-3 Illustrated by Emma Chichester Clark. In Morpurgo's Hamelin Town, the children starve while the "rich and the greedy lived like kings and queens." Then comes a "plague of rats," who eat all the food and begin hunting in packs. Before its happy ending, the book is pretty grim; Clark's watercolors lighten the mood with lots of patterns and by depicting the rats as slightly comical.

Reviewer: Susan Dove Lempke | Horn Book Magazine Issue: January, 2012

(3) K-3 In this retelling of "The Pied Piper of Hamelin," a black stranger calling himself the Steel Pan Man promises Harlem's white mayor that he will solve the city's rat problem in exchange for a million dollars. The vivid illustrations--comical, painterly, sure-handed--feature rollicking dance scenes with participants of different races, extolling the power of music and community.

Reviewer: Nell Beram

(2) YA The spare title captures the suffocating atmosphere of medieval Germany ravaged by plague brought on by a rat infestation and illness brought on by a "killer fungus." Twelve-year-old Salz, an outsider in his family and the community, suffers at the center of this chaos. This intriguing tale might work even without the introduction of the Pied Piper, so compelling are the portraits of its protagonist and family and the horrific events that beset them.

Reviewer: Susan P. Bloom | Horn Book Magazine Issue: January, 2004