This is yet another Newbery list book that glorifies the occult. I'm a Christian and think this is not a good book for Christians to give to their children. I'm going to tell you in only a few words exactly what's in this book but this is totally a spoiler so it is your choice if you want to know the plot before you read it yourself.

The book is about the four Stanley children and their new older step-sister, Amanda. Amanda comes to live with them and is dressed in a witchcraft costume she's fashioned for herself. She's obviously angry at her mother and hates her new step-father as well. She starts teaching the four younger children how to become witches and leads them through various ordeals leading up to an initiation ceremony. By this time we're midway through the book. Then there's a seance involving all five children. After that Amanda learns that in the distant past it was rumored there was a poltergeist in the house, which is about one hundred years old. Before long poltergeist type things start happening in the house once again. Although there's a satisfying ending to the book, the specter of the supernatural arises once again on the last pages.

The Headless Cupid is fiction but also is like a manual for learning about the occult including witchcraft, seances, hauntings and poltergeist activity. Is this what we want to fill our children's minds with?

This book is a Newbery Honor book from 1972, so it has been recommended to many children over the years and received a lot of attention. The writing is good enough. The child characters are well-developed and interesting. If I were judging this book on style and readability I'd give it four stars. However, since I'm a Christian I'm thinking about the content which should be alarming to any Christian who actually reads the Bible, including this passage from Deuteronomy 18:

"10 There shall not be found among you anyone who makes his son or his daughter pass through the fire, or one who practices witchcraft, or a soothsayer, or one who interprets omens, or a sorcerer, 11 or one who conjures spells, or a medium, or a spiritist, or one who calls up the dead. 12 For all who do these things are an abomination to the Lord, and because of these abominations the Lord your God drives them out from before you. 13 You shall be blameless before the Lord your God. 14 For these nations which you will dispossess listened to soothsayers and diviners; but as for you, the Lord your God has not appointed such for you.” - Deuteronomy 18:10-14

For years now I've been wanting to read all the books on the Newbery list, both medal winners and honor books. Maybe the reason I'm led to do this is to discover the ungodly books the Newbery committee is glorifying, promoting, and recommending to children. Obviously our society has developed many more problems since the 1970's and Satan is hard at work infiltrating the thoughts and lives of our children. I think this book is a small part of the ongoing tragedy.

I read many Zilpha Keatley Snyder stories in my youth. The Greensky books were life-changing for me, but I also really loved The Changeling. I never did read The Headless Cupid, however—until now.

The pacing is very leisurely. We meet good-hearted David and his three younger siblings, who are all distinct, charming personalities. We learn that David’s mother died some time ago, that his dad remarried and now they’ve moved to a huge old house out in the country, and that his stepmother’s daughter Amanda is coming to live with them.

She arrives, and she’s an angry mess, but David and younger kids don’t really care, because she’s into the supernatural, has a pet crow, and is training to be a witch, and they’re intrigued. She’s high handed and obnoxious with them, and it just kind of rolls right off them. She tries to lord it over them, and they … just enjoy it.

I don’t know how I would have felt about Amanda if I had been reading the story as a kid. As an adult, I didn’t like her very much. I was offended on behalf of David and the others, and as a parent, I could only think what a trial she’d be.

But she *is* imaginative (even if her first game with the others, slaves and slave driver, just would NOT fly in the present world). And you end up feeling a little sorry for her—though she’d hate that--because she’s always being shown up in small ways by the others (they get along better with her pets than she does, they know more about reptiles and herbs than she does). Furthermore David and his siblings have each other, and David has a good relationship with both his own father and Amanda’s mother. Given those facts, it’s pretty amazing that Amanda is as friendly as she is, and I guess we can intuit from that how much she craves exactly what the other four are offering, even if she can’t admit that fact to herself. And ZKS manages to convey all that without being heavy-handed. It’s all there, but lightly.

I did kind of want more actual supernatural stuff. There was a lot of “is it or isn’t it?” much of which gets placed firmly in the “it isn’t” category, but there was some stuff that remained ambiguous, and I wanted more of that. David’s little brother Jamie has a kind of Charles Wallace vibe going on, and I wanted to see him do more communing with crows—or ghosts.

But for all that, it was a satisfying story—perceptive about human nature, and engaging in its small details.

The four Stanley children - David, Janie, Esther and Blair - are fascinated by their new stepsister Amanda in The Headless Cupid, drawn by her claims to be a practitioner of the occult. When Amanda offers to teach the children about the supernatural world, the “ordeals” she arranges to test them seem mostly aimed at antagonizing her own mother Molly, whom she blames for her parents’ divorce. But when David and Amanda discover that their house was once believed to have a poltergeist, and Amanda holds a seance to contact the ghost, a series of frightening incidents occur...

The first in a series of titles about the Stanley children (continuing with: n  The Famous Stanley Kidnapping Casen, n  Blair's Nightmaren, and n  Janie's Private Eyesn), this charming family drama is quite similar to n  The Egypt Gamen, in the sense that events which at first appear to be supernatural, are later discovered to be the result of more mundane human agency. Snyder's second novel to be named a Newbery Honor Book, The Headless Cupid is an engaging, suspenseful mystery for young readers, and showcases the author's sensitive appreciation of the subtleties of childhood experience...

I really wasn’t sure what I was getting into with this book. Was it a paranormal thing, was it a cute story about children learning how to live together as a mixed family? Each description spun it differently, so I started the book confused as to what I was supposed to think about it. This book centers on David, the oldest of the Stanley children. Amanda comes to live with them, and he finds her interesting. She studies the occult and witchcraft and takes the Stanley children as her apprentices, to teach them how to do spells and read the future. The thing is, they may have awakened a ghost with their activities.

I enjoyed this book; Snyder perfectly encapsulates a lot of what it is to be young. The tense friendship that David and Amanda strike is incredibly realistic; she resents her mother for re-marrying, but she also likes having friends and other people to entertain, so they have a somewhat “frenemy” vibe. I also absolutely loved how the magic-teaching was handled in this book. I have had seances and done spells at ten years old that could be a direct copy of what was done in this book, which was just perfect. However, this all provides a backdrop for exploring issues surrounding divorce and re-marriage: learning to live in a new place, accepting that your parents are no longer together, being a sibling to kids you haven’t met before, etc. Amanda is incredibly confused and hurt by her mother’s remarriage, so she works it out through these magical activities. This would be a great book to give to a fanciful child who’s having some issues dealing with a separation.

However, the story isn’t overly heavy and laden with emotional trauma. It’s fun and whimsical and has some great paranormal stuff going on with a possible haunting. I like that it toes the line between paranormal and realistic, not really leaning in either direction. This is well worth its Newbery Honor and I highly recommend it.

Also posted on Purple People Readers.

Children deal with living in a haunted house. When I was a kid, this was an unbearably spooky book.

I read this because I enjoyed the Egypt Game. I've been trying to read more children's literature so I can make better recommendations to our students. This one had me laughing out loud at times and also in such suspense that I had to keep turning the pages to see what really was happening. It definitely creeped me out a little. I'm pleased to see there are more books in this series - will definitely read them as I love the characters - especially the three youngest ones along for the ride.

Not quite 5 stars because of the ending. I have so many questions.

But if you’re looking for a quick read about the supernatural, magic, and poltergeists, this is the book for you.

The Headless Cupid exists in the same eerie world as Phyllis Reynolds Naylor's Witch books Witch's Sister and The Ghost Next Door or Lois Duncan's Summer of Fear (The Children of Green Knowe has this flavor as well, only more gothic and less suspenseful). Snyder was one of the masters of the craft of children's literature; The Headless Cupid continues to hold up really well. It's deliciously slow, and like the best suspense and ghost stories, tricky. She uses David, her main character, and his thoughts and beliefs to trick us into thinking things are one way... and then turns the tables on us in a most extraordinarily wonderful way. I never need blood and gore to make my spine tingle - The Headless Cupid is perfect that way.

Found this when I was looking for a book for Miles - I loved this book when I was a kid. Guess what, I still like it! Good writing, good messages, and a poltergeist storyline to hold interest.

At one of the library's booksales, I picked up a bunch of books that I liked or were super-popular when I was in elementary school. This is the first one I've actually read, and it was fun to indulge the nostalgia. While resolution at the end was a little too quick, I thought, the rest of it was still good!

4.5 A lot of negative reviews seem to focus on Amanda’s lack of likability. To me that just signals a lack of empathy in a person’s reading. Maybe even a little bit of wanting portrayals of children to be rose-tinted rather than realistic. I like reading about characters who make mistakes, characters who sometimes deal with their feelings poorly, etc, not only in middle grade books, but maybe especially in middle grade books. Being a kid is hard, and everything is more intense, there are a lot more firsts, therefore a lot fewer experiences to draw from when things happen.

I liked this book a lot, and look forward to reading more by Snyder, since I missed out on her as an equally imperfect kid.

I hope folks in the Newbery discussion group, or other reviewers, can say more about this story to convince it's worthy of a Newbery Honor. To me it seemed almost like any other 'issues' novel, with the stepsister having trouble adapting to her new family. Her version of acting out is original, and there are some memorable details, but I didn't particularly enjoy my read and would not have when I was young, either.

Some bits that may prompt discussion, in our Children's Books group:

"Once, David had decided to make a project of watching Skip to find out about being cool. He had decided that being cool was never being embarrassed or nervous or bashful. It was also never taking anything, or anybody, very seriously. It was especially cool to be bored when other people were taking themselves seriously...."

"... he'd asked his mother if she believed in ghosts, and she'd said that she didn't disbelieve in anything that made the world more exciting."

Amanda says " I wasn't trying to get the weeding done. I was just practicing my powers. An important part of being an occult person is developing your power over other people."

Blair is an interesting character. Even though he's the first, sometimes the only, person to notice things, even David doesn't take him seriously enough. For example when he points out that Amanda is afraid of snakes, and David says, no, it's Molly who is.

The independence the children are given is shocking. They haven't been demonstrating responsibility, but still the 11 yo, the 12 yo, and three little children are left on their own all day one time, and several hours at least once else.

"When she looked at David, he did something he hadn't planned to do--he stared back at her. It was a long straight look--the kind of cool look he'd never been able to get just right before. But what surprised him was it wasn't really cool at all, because what was really behind it was anger."