Twelve-year-old Ali is excited by the prospect of spending the summer at Sycamore Lake, babysitting her four-year-old cousin Emma while her Aunt Dulcie paints at the newly renovated, long-deserted family cottage. But who is the neighbor girl “Sissy,” who wedges herself like a thorn between the two girls? Who is “Teresa,” the girl torn out of a family photograph, and who all the town seems to know about? Why does Ali’s mother refuse to come to the cabin, and why do Dulcie’s paintings suddenly take a dark and watery tone? Signature spooky Hahn sends appropriate shivers up the reader’s spine. If Ali’s insights into Sissy’s psychological problems are surprisingly mature, they’re necessary to render the reader’s delightful fright into a satisfyingly chilly but calm resolution. Not terribly surprising, but it does the trick. (Fiction. 9-13)
Pub Date: May 21, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-618-66545-7
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Clarion Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2007
Who can't love a story about a Nigerian-American 12-year-old with albinism who discovers latent magical abilities and saves the world? Sunny lives in Nigeria after spending the first nine years of her life in New York. She can't play soccer with the boys because, as she says, "being albino made the sun my enemy," and she has only enemies at school. When a boy in her class, Orlu, rescues her from a beating, Sunny is drawn in to a magical world she's never known existed. Sunny, it seems, is a Leopard person, one of the magical folk who live in a world mostly populated by ignorant Lambs. Now she spends the day in mundane Lamb school and sneaks out at night to learn magic with her cadre of Leopard friends: a handsome American bad boy, an arrogant girl who is Orlu’s childhood friend and Orlu himself. Though Sunny's initiative is thin—she is pushed into most of her choices by her friends and by Leopard adults—the worldbuilding for Leopard society is stellar, packed with details that will enthrall readers bored with the same old magical worlds. Meanwhile, those looking for a touch of the familiar will find it in Sunny's biggest victories, which are entirely non-magical (the detailed dynamism of Sunny's soccer match is more thrilling than her magical world saving). Ebulliently original. (Fantasy. 11-13)
Pub Date: April 14, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-670-01196-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2011
Pulled in different directions by her heart and by family duty, a daughter of the noble Fujiwara clan also has an angry ghost to appease in this busy sequel to Little Sister (1996). Two years after Mitsuko entered the land of the dead in search of her sister’s soul, ominous dreams remind her of her vow to repair a small shrine in which she once took refuge. At the same time, her father announces that Mitsuko is to marry an 11- year-old prince. She once again calls on Goranu, the mischievous, immortal shape-changer who fell in love with her. Exchanging insults and tart retorts, the two grow closer as Mitsuko faces a dragon, the shrine’s vengeful kami (spirit), and a host of other supernatural beings. Under Goranu’s tutelage, Mitsuko learns how to use her wits, and by the end has overcome the treacherous kami, helped engineer the prince’s marriage to her sister, and even met Lord Emma-O in the Court of the Dead. More than most sequels, this story relies on knowledge of its predecessor. Dalkey supplies a glossary and historical postscript, but readers unfamiliar with the first book will miss nuances in characters and relationships, and have only a sketchy picture of the 12th- century locales and social patterns. Together, however, the two novels combine a courageous teenager’s well-articulated escape from the limits and preconceptions forced on her by a rigid, highly structured upbringing with a colorful, not altogether earnest, series of encounters with powerful beings from Buddhist and Shinto lore. (Fiction. 11-13)
Pub Date: April 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-15-201652-X
Page Count: 230
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1998
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