Pay the Piper by Jane Yolen & Adam Stemple

Yolen, Jane and Adam Stemple. Pay the Piper: A Rock ‘n’ Roll Fairy Tale. New York: Starscape, 2005.

When Callie sees the lead singer of Brass Rat making rats dance, she knows she’s stumbled onto more than the eccentricities of the music world. She’s found the Pied Piper of Hamelin. That’s right—the guy who steals children.

The pied pier is actually an exiled Faerie prince who must pay a debt every seven year to remain immortal. This year, he doesn’t have the silver and gold, so it must be souls.

When the neighborhood children, including her younger brother Nick, disappear, it’s up to Callie to rescue the children and break the curse on the faerie prince.

What I thought: This book was a slow start for me. I found the narrative a bit disjointed (two story lines—Callie’s and the Piper’s). But I’ll chalk that up to my unfamiliarity with the original Pied Piper story. Once I got into the story, I loved it. Callie is a true heroine. Love the songs (poems?) in the book. They’re so lyrical that just reading them makes me her music in my head.