CHILDREN'S
Released: May 23, 1983
"The chase and the boy-girl match are strictly standard stuff; and if The Nicholas Factor represents a shaky advance in political sophistication, the implausible motivation of all the Crusaders, villains and dupes alike, requires an overgenerous suspension of judgment."
In this junior-grade spy thriller Myers moves from his easy colloquial stories of good-doing Harlem teens to older characters—narrator Gerald McQuillen is a 17-year-old college freshman—and a less innocent, warier view of self-appointed world-savers.
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CHILDREN'S
Released: May 3, 1982
"Another of Myers' winning, medium-cool raps in the service of good old-fashioned values."
Like The Young Landlords who found themselves responsible to the diverse elderly tenants of a rundown tenement, Myers' latest group of wholesome early teenagers spends a summer helping out at a neighborhood old-people's home.
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CHILDREN'S
Released: Oct. 22, 1980
"If it's all a little goody-goody, Myers as usual cloaks his straight-and-narrow messages in easy colloquial dialogue and street-corner savvy."
"How come you ain't nothing but some children? I ain't never heard of no children landlords before."
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CHILDREN'S
Released: Oct. 13, 1980
"However kids construe this, it has only Pundabi's wise stratagem to commend it: the telling has no lift, the pictures have a cliched, picturesque likeness to India but no conviction."
If it's appropriate for a story about a kvetch "to have a Yiddish flavor" (see Chapman, above), it may be appropriate for a story of ineffable wisdom to be set in India; the problem is that it has no flavor.
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CHILDREN'S
Released: March 17, 1980
"Quackenbush writes some extra jokes into the pictures, but overall his illustrations are so loud that they drown out the words—a fate that the first story deserves and the second is too weak to overcome."
CHILDREN'S
Released: Sept. 25, 1978
"Sound base, authentic surface—like Tippy, a winner."
As both Branscum and Rabe come out with grit-and-hardship dramas of 1930s orphans, Myers gives us a contemporary Harlem kid whose problems seem more real and more serious even though he has a father and, thanks to welfare, knows he will eat.
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CHILDREN'S
Released: Oct. 1, 1977
"No tea leaves needed to figure out the resolution, but kids will respond to the vitality, stoop wisdom, and scattered magic."
As in Fast Sam, Cool Clyde, and Stuff (1975), Myers has rounded up a bunch of spunky youngsters, and their snappy dialogue and urban brio tend to cover up the plot improbabilities.
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CHILDREN'S
Released: April 1, 1975
"Stuff can be a little long-winded in Holden Caulfield-like digressions, and his friends awfully earnest in their discussions of sex and drugs, but in general his colloquial first-person narrative projects a sense of enviable group rapport with an easy mix of nostalgia and humor."
Stuff, the youngest, moves to 116th Street when he is twelve and a half, and this is by way of a fond memoir of the kids he came to hang out with.
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CHILDREN'S
Released: Sept. 1, 1974
"Despite occasionally conspicuous attempts to be poetic, an affecting balance of wishes and reality, well suited to reading aloud."
Soft black and brown sketches of Jimmy and his inner city world provide a quiet, suggestive accompaniment to Myers' pleasingly fluent prose-poem about the little boy's dreams of flying like a bird.
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CHILDREN'S
Released: April 15, 1972
"MPSLUGMRS Rockwell's pictures do their best to make up for the absence of music and dance to sustain the fantasy, but the story is less imaginative than just unlikely."
This begins as a realistic story about a little boy (black) going to work with his father (a prop man?) and watching Yvonne, a beautiful ballerina (white) rehearse.
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CHILDREN'S
Released: March 10, 1972
"A mismatch in every respect."
It's evident from the start of this pointless intercultural hocus-pocus that Harry the lonely dragon is a real loser: in order to win a wife he must defeat a knight in battle, but Harry can't fight.
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