Roar of the Lambs

Gr 9 Up–When nonbinary teen Apollo walks into the Red Hourglass and asks for their fortune, Winona’s psychic powers show her, Apollo, and their cousin Cyrus in Winona’s old family home. Mistrusting the young men, Winona and her cousin Yas head to the house, where Winona finds a mysterious white box that whispers to her in gibberish. Soon, she’s having terrifying visions of the end of the world brought on by Cyrus’s desperation to possess the box. To stop the apocalypse, Winona teams up with Apollo, and the pair try to solve the puzzle of what’s inside the box before Cyrus does, while also falling in love. The box itself is causing nightmares and taking control of the pair, adding horror elements. While Winona and Apollo’s story unfolds, interludes reveal the history of the box starting in 1899. The intriguing plot is occasionally hampered by slow pacing and underdeveloped characters, and Cyrus’s villainy is almost comically exaggerated. The box’s gibberish and the inclusion of a cipher puzzle add an interesting element for those determined to crack the code, though the full cipher is never revealed. One exceptionally good element is Apollo’s nonbinary identity and the representation it provides in the genre. A content warning at the beginning includes body horror, classism, racism and misogyny, kidnapping, and transphobic bullying. Apollo is biracial Black and white, Cyrus is white, and Winona and Yas are Black.