Engaging, with strokes of brilliance.
Fourteen award-winning authors craft stories to accompany the captioned pictures from Van Allsburg’s 1984 enigma, The Mysteries of Harris Burdick.
That title contained 14 exquisitely rendered pencil drawings, purportedly deposited with an editor by their self-ascribed creator. Promising to return with companion texts, Burdick disappeared instead, leaving a generation of readers to puzzle over the incongruous illustrations. United only by the sense of macabre disequilibrium permeating each illustration, this volume’s stories vary in approach and effectiveness. Jules Feiffer delivers a clever but self-aggrandizing fable about a picture book author/illustrator whose increasingly mad attachment to his characters signals his demise. Jon Scieszka’s intentionally clichéd “Under the Rug” seems shallow and dashed-off compared to deeply imagined pieces like M.T. Anderson’s twitchily metaphysical “Just Desert.” Kate DiCamillo’s adroit epistolary tale, set on the World War II home front, uses the image of an escaping wallpaper bird as the touchstone for a traumatized girl’s breakthrough beyond silence and fear. Cory Doctorow’s time-space ramble centers on four adventuring children, ignoring that the accompanying drawing depicts the travelers as two children, a thick-set woman and a derby-hatted man. Linda Sue Park’s “The Harp” deftly directs charming characters in parallel plots to a meshed, triply happy ending, and Lois Lowry dazzles with a sophisticated meditation on “The Seven Chairs,” wherein mid-century Catholicism bows beneath the archetypal (and, perhaps, renascent) rise of women.
Engaging, with strokes of brilliance. (new and original introductions, author bios) (Fiction. 8-13)Pub Date: Oct. 25, 2011
ISBN: 978-0547548104
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: April 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
Rich and strange (and kitted out with an eye-catching cover), but stronger in the set pieces than the internal logic.
Chainani works an elaborate sea change akin to Gregory Maguire’s Wicked (1995), though he leaves the waters muddied.
Every four years, two children, one regarded as particularly nice and the other particularly nasty, are snatched from the village of Gavaldon by the shadowy School Master to attend the divided titular school. Those who survive to graduate become major or minor characters in fairy tales. When it happens to sweet, Disney princess–like Sophie and her friend Agatha, plain of features, sour of disposition and low of self-esteem, they are both horrified to discover that they’ve been dropped not where they expect but at Evil and at Good respectively. Gradually—too gradually, as the author strings out hundreds of pages of Hogwarts-style pranks, classroom mishaps and competitions both academic and romantic—it becomes clear that the placement wasn’t a mistake at all. Growing into their true natures amid revelations and marked physical changes, the two spark escalating rivalry between the wings of the school. This leads up to a vicious climactic fight that sees Good and Evil repeatedly switching sides. At this point, readers are likely to feel suddenly left behind, as, thanks to summary deus ex machina resolutions, everything turns out swell(ish).
Rich and strange (and kitted out with an eye-catching cover), but stronger in the set pieces than the internal logic. (Fantasy. 11-13)Pub Date: May 14, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-06-210489-2
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Feb. 12, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2013
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Plays to Rowling’s fan base; equally suited for gifting and reading aloud or alone.
A 7-year-old descends into the Land of the Lost in search of his beloved comfort object.
Jack has loved Dur Pig long enough to wear the beanbag toy into tattered shapelessness—which is why, when his angry older stepsister chucks it out the car window on Christmas Eve, he not only throws a titanic tantrum and viciously rejects the titular replacement pig, but resolves to sneak out to find DP. To his amazement, the Christmas Pig offers to guide him to the place where all lost Things go. Whiffs of childhood classics, assembled with admirable professionalism into a jolly adventure story that plays all the right chords, hang about this tale of loss and love. Along with family drama, Rowling stirs in fantasy, allegory, and generous measures of social and political commentary. Pursued by the Land’s cruel and monstrous Loser, Jack and the Christmas Pig pass through territories from the Wastes of the Unlamented, where booger-throwing Bad Habits roam, to the luxurious City of the Missed for encounters with Hope, Happiness, and Power (a choleric king who rejects a vote that doesn’t go his way). A joyful reunion on the Island of the Beloved turns poignant, but Christmas Eve being “a night for miracles and lost causes,” perhaps there’s still a chance (with a little help from Santa) for everything to come right? In both the narrative and Field’s accomplished, soft-focus illustrations, the cast presents White.
Plays to Rowling’s fan base; equally suited for gifting and reading aloud or alone. (Fantasy. 8-12)Pub Date: Oct. 12, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-338-79023-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Scholastic
Review Posted Online: Oct. 20, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2021
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