Seven Spiders Spinning (Hamlet Chronicles)

When seven Siberian snow spiders, frozen during the Ice Age, defrost and escape en route to Harvard for analysis, they wreak havoc on a small New England town, disrupting the school Halloween pageant with hilarious results.

From Publishers Weekly

This high-camp fantasy-mystery uses farcical elements to embellish a tale of spider intrigue. En route to a lab at Harvard, seven Siberian snow spiders escape from the frozen blocks of ice that held them captive for thousands of years. The hapless spiders scuttle their way into Hamlet, Vt., where they witness a meeting of the Tattletales, a club of seven elementary school girls. Besotted by the Tattletales, the spiders set out one by one to meet the girl of their choice-with fatal results. As the spiders' numbers decline, the spurned survivors lose their ardor and begin to seek revenge. Fit into this a subplot involving a romance between the truck driver who transported the spiders and the nurse who lulls him out of a coma by reading love stories and bestowing kisses. Add a meddlesome reporter named Meg Snoople, who is determined to uncover the missing spiders, and the plot only thickens. Though the story moves along at a brisk pace, the humor risks being precious and, sometimes, arch. The compassion of Maguire's more serious and wittier Missing Sisters is absent. Ages 8-12. Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From School Library Journal

Grade 3-6-Seven tarantulas preserved in a glacier since prehistoric times are discovered, fall out of their refrigerated crate on their way to Harvard scientists, and thaw in rural, present-day Vermont. Given this premise, readers follow the rather intelligent creatures' trail of poisonous love and revenge. The objects of their affection (and later their hate) are The Tattletales, a group of girls whose school rivals are the Copycats (boys). The two groups finally call a truce and combine forces to rescue their beloved teacher, Miss Earth, when she receives a deadly bite. As the tale progresses and each of the arachnids approaches its potential victim, the suspense builds. However, there is quite a bit of tongue-in-cheek humor here, as well. Characters are almost caricatures-the standard bossy girl, studious boy, motherly school aide, and too-good-to-be-true pretty teacher. Yet, somehow it all comes together to create a funny, shivery story of ancient Siberian snow spiders and the problems they cause in a peaceful New England village. The book is a bit long, but would make a great read-aloud and a satisfying choice for fans of humorous horror. Beth Tegart, Oneida City Schools, NYCopyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

Gr. 4-6. In a broad farce, reminiscent of the gross fun and fantasy of Roald Dahl and Mother Goose, seven deadly tarantulas from before the dawn of time invade a contemporary classroom in rural Vermont, where the kids are preparing a Halloween pageant of horrors. Demon spiders, lover spiders, greedy spiders, sensitive spiders--they all go on heroic quests that get entangled in classroom rivalries and local soap operas. Some of the parody is adult and self-conscious, and few kids will get the arch allusions to postmodern rhetoric or to scholarly epics, but they'll love the mockery of popular culture. Everything is part of the comic brew, from the nightly news and Spidergate to Dracula, The Wizard of Oz, Charlotte's Web, and Little Miss Muffet. In fact, this is the stuff of many a grade-school skit. Hazel Rochman

From Kirkus Reviews

A lighthearted fantasy that, while easily read, is as intricately structured as a spider's web. The arachnids in question are hatched just in time to be preserved in ice as the Ice Age clamps down; in a series of happenstances succinctly summarized in a preface, they make their way from Russia to 20th- century Vermont, where their sudden appearance after accidentally thawing precipitates a heart attack on the part of the truck driver who's taking them to researchers at Harvard University. The first fellow creatures the escaped spiders see are seven schoolgirls, the Tattletales: ``Each spider picked out a girl to be its mother.'' But the devotion inspired by this imprinting soon curdles into hate as, one by one, the spiders seek out their loved ones in the local school and come to dire demises--luckily, since (though only the reader knows this until the end) the spiders have a deadly bite. Meanwhile, nice teacher Miss Earth tries to get the Tattletales and their male rivals, the Copycats, to cooperate in a class Halloween skit; there's a comic romance between the hospitalized truck driver and Nurse Lark, despite curmudgeonly Head Nurse Crisp; and obnoxious TV muckraker Meg Snoople prowls in a helicopter, trying to incite trouble so that she can report it. In a grand finale, the penultimate spider bites the beloved Miss Earth, who is saved, in the best classic tradition, with the help of all (including the insistent Snoople), by an ingenious and perfectly childlike cure. A fast, delightfully entertaining romp. (Fiction. 8-12) -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About the Author

Gregory Maguire is the popular author of many books for children, including the Hamlet Chronicles for Clarion, as well as several adult books, including WICKED (HarperCollins), upon which a Broadway musical was based, and its sequel, CONFESSIONS OF AN UGLY STEPSISTER (Regan Books). He lives in Concord, Massachusetts.

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