Highly recommended for young fans of horse-related fiction.
In Michael and Jennifer Grais’ YA novel, a 13-year-old’s fate intertwines with that of the legendary Lost Herd of wild mustangs that roams the canyons of Nevada.
Christa Cassidy knows that she’s lucky. She lives with her parents and older sister on a small ranch in a beautiful part of the world; she has a grandmother who loves her; and she’s expecting a baby sister before the end of the summer. She even has her own horse named Lucky. But like any other teenager, she’s suspended between childhood and adulthood, unsure of her place in the world, at odds with her family, and uncomfortable with the way she looks, talks, acts, and feels. She’s really only at home when she’s sitting on a horse—particularly when she’s trying to track the Lost Herd through the canyons around her home. But when something horrible happens to Lucky, Christa’s world is upended, and things only get worse when it becomes clear that the Bureau of Land Management intends to round up the mustangs. With the help of a strong, troubled horse named Jenner, Christa is determined to figure out what’s going on. She soon finds that she must rein in her own passions as well as her horses, and she won’t accomplish anything without friends and help. Every aspect of this novel is competently done, including the accurate, empathetic descriptions of Christa’s teenage peevishness, the character studies of the various horses, and the appealing descriptions of the starkly beautiful landscape where the mustangs roam. Michael Grais, the co-screenwriter of the 1982 film Poltergeist, and his wife, Jennifer, develop the plot handily, with a slow build toward a final, cinematic crisis in which Christa and her friends enact a daring rescue. However, the build may be a bit too slow, as it seems as if the story could have been accomplished in less than 200 pages instead of more than 300. There are also so many serendipitous sightings of the Lost Herd that it really doesn’t seem very lost, after all. In the end, however, this is a satisfying YA novel—with a bold, visionary, and active young heroine, to boot.
Highly recommended for young fans of horse-related fiction.Pub Date: June 15, 2015
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: April 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Readers can still rely on this series to bring laughs.
The Heffley family’s house undergoes a disastrous attempt at home improvement.
When Great Aunt Reba dies, she leaves some money to the family. Greg’s mom calls a family meeting to determine what to do with their share, proposing home improvements and then overruling the family’s cartoonish wish lists and instead pushing for an addition to the kitchen. Before bringing in the construction crew, the Heffleys attempt to do minor maintenance and repairs themselves—during which Greg fails at the work in various slapstick scenes. Once the professionals are brought in, the problems keep getting worse: angry neighbors, terrifying problems in walls, and—most serious—civil permitting issues that put the kibosh on what work’s been done. Left with only enough inheritance to patch and repair the exterior of the house—and with the school’s dismal standardized test scores as a final straw—Greg’s mom steers the family toward moving, opening up house-hunting and house-selling storylines (and devastating loyal Rowley, who doesn’t want to lose his best friend). While Greg’s positive about the move, he’s not completely uncaring about Rowley’s action. (And of course, Greg himself is not as unaffected as he wishes.) The gags include effectively placed callbacks to seemingly incidental events (the “stress lizard” brought in on testing day is particularly funny) and a lampoon of after-school-special–style problem books. Just when it seems that the Heffleys really will move, a new sequence of chaotic trouble and property destruction heralds a return to the status quo. Whew.
Readers can still rely on this series to bring laughs. (Graphic/fiction hybrid. 8-12)Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-4197-3903-3
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Amulet/Abrams
Review Posted Online: Nov. 18, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
Little Blue’s fans will enjoy the animal sounds and counting opportunities, but it’s the sparkling lights on the truck’s own...
The sturdy Little Blue Truck is back for his third adventure, this time delivering Christmas trees to his band of animal pals.
The truck is decked out for the season with a Christmas wreath that suggests a nose between headlights acting as eyeballs. Little Blue loads up with trees at Toad’s Trees, where five trees are marked with numbered tags. These five trees are counted and arithmetically manipulated in various ways throughout the rhyming story as they are dropped off one by one to Little Blue’s friends. The final tree is reserved for the truck’s own use at his garage home, where he is welcomed back by the tree salestoad in a neatly circular fashion. The last tree is already decorated, and Little Blue gets a surprise along with readers, as tiny lights embedded in the illustrations sparkle for a few seconds when the last page is turned. Though it’s a gimmick, it’s a pleasant surprise, and it fits with the retro atmosphere of the snowy country scenes. The short, rhyming text is accented with colored highlights, red for the animal sounds and bright green for the numerical words in the Christmas-tree countdown.
Little Blue’s fans will enjoy the animal sounds and counting opportunities, but it’s the sparkling lights on the truck’s own tree that will put a twinkle in a toddler’s eyes. (Picture book. 2-5)Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-544-32041-3
Page Count: 24
Publisher: HMH Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 11, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2014
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