R.L. Stine has written books for kids since the 1970's, beginning with joke books, moving on to the Choose-Your-Own Adventure variety, and finally gaining fame and fortune while writing horror for children. Patrick Jones is a Houston librarian who has read R.L. Stine's entire body of work, and traces the threads and themes of his early writings all the way to his current Fear Street and Goosebumps titles. Jones attempts to define the characteristics that have made Stine such a popular author with young readers, despite criticism by adults and critics.

In the future, where terrorism and chaos threaten everyday life, Deveraux Academy (aka Spy High) is dedicated to cultivating secret agents from handpicked teenagers plucked from their ordinary lives and transplanted into a school where martial arts, spycraft, and history of espionage are the preferred subjects. But Bond Team is refusing to gel. In order to get them to overcome their infighting, they are abandoned in the dangerous wilderness to learn to work together as a team... or die.

The cast of characters is a little large and the book is a little short for the main characters to really develop as individuals... but the series is twelve books long, and the focus is more on action/adventure rather than character development. The crossover with Frankenstein was also unnecessary. However, if you're looking for some light, fun, fast reading, Spy High has plenty of action to keep the pages turning.

It's 1907, and Bing and his father live in Vancouver's Chinatown. Bing's father, Ba, is a bone collector--- his job is to recover bones from the Chinese cemetery and send them back to their home villages in China, so they may be buried with their ancestors. But Bing is afraid of ghosts, so when he gets the chance to get a job as a houseboy, he jumps at it. But the house he works in is haunted, too! Will Bing be able to save his father from a restless ghost? Will he be able to calm the spirit that haunts the house where he works? And will he be able to survive the racism and prejudice of the living Canadians who share his city?

This story does a good job of integrating the cultural and the historical with the fictional. Bing is a likeable main character who has to deal with both internal issues (such as his own fears of ghosts) and external issues (such as racism). The story incorporates a number of traditional Chinese ghost stories for extra cultural flavor. It's a much more subtle kind of ghost/horror story than a lot of the current offerings out there, but it flows quickly and can easily be devoured in an afternoon.