A masterpiece of storytelling that is addictive and engrossing.
Gidwitz strikes literary gold with this mirthful and compulsively readable adventure story set in medieval France.
In a style reminiscent of The Canterbury Tales, this multiple-narrator fairy tale relates the adventures of Jeanne, a white Christian peasant girl who has prophetic visions; biracial white/black William, a Muslim-born monk-in-training with preternatural strength; and Jacob, a Jewish boy with incredible healing powers. While some townspeople hail them as saints for their gifts, other, narrow-minded Christians drive the children from their homes on a journey that takes them from the church of Saint Denis to a confrontation with Louis IX and his mother in Paris. While the three protagonists initially come together out of necessity, the heartwarming friendship they form celebrates a common humanity that transcends the bounds of race, religion, and social class. The author creates a richly designed medieval world, filled with imperious knights, farting dragons, foreboding forests, and soulless fiends, in which nothing is as it seems, including the tellers of the tales. As the story grows darker and more intricate, the dubious cast of narrators lends greater complexity to the sequence of events, forcing readers to question everything that they believe regarding each character’s exploits. Gidwitz’s lighthearted touch nonetheless provides for insightful commentary on the dangers of narrow-mindedness and zealotry that will resonate with modern readers.
A masterpiece of storytelling that is addictive and engrossing. (Fantasy. 11 & up)Pub Date: Sept. 27, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-525-42616-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: July 1, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A few promising, even brilliant bits are lost in an ill-constructed jumble of warring plotlines and ambiguous agendas.
As fleets of hostile warships gather over a floating city, a young thief finds himself the object of an urgent manhunt.
Readers can be excused for coming away bewildered by Sheehan’s competing storylines, disconnected events, genre-bending revelations, and refusal to fit any of the major players in the all-White–presenting cast consistently into the roles of villain, ally, or even protagonist. Continually shifting through points of view and annoyingly punctuated with an omniscient narrator’s portentous commentary, the tale centers on the exploits of 12-year-old street urchin Milo Quick and his squad of juvenile ragamuffins (seemingly juvenile at any rate; one is eventually revealed to be something else entirely) in an aerial city of Dickensian squalor threatened by a multinational flying armada. Though a lot of people are after Milo, ranging from the swashbuckling crew of a flying privateer hired (ostensibly) to kidnap him and a vengeful punk bent on bloody murder to a sinister truant officer paid lavishly by mysterious parties to watch over him, he ultimately winds up—or so it seems—being no more than a red herring all along. The actual target is revealed piecemeal in conversations and flashbacks before the commencement of a climactic bombardment and an abrupt cutoff in which three side characters, miraculously shrugging off multiple knife and bullet wounds, themselves suddenly take center stage to set up a sequel.
A few promising, even brilliant bits are lost in an ill-constructed jumble of warring plotlines and ambiguous agendas. (Science fiction. 11-14)Pub Date: March 15, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-593-10951-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: Dec. 23, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2022
Narrow squeaks aplenty combine with bursts of lyrical prose for a satisfying adventure
A Prohibition-era child enlists a gifted pickpocket and a pair of budding circus performers in a clever ruse to save her ancestral home from being stolen by developers.
Rundell sets her iron-jawed protagonist on a seemingly impossible quest: to break into the ramshackle Hudson River castle from which her grieving grandfather has been abruptly evicted by unscrupulous con man Victor Sorrotore and recover a fabulously valuable hidden emerald. Laying out an elaborate scheme in a notebook that itself turns out to be an integral part of the ensuing caper, Vita, only slowed by a bout with polio years before, enlists a team of helpers. Silk, a light-fingered orphan, aspiring aerialist Samuel Kawadza, and Arkady, a Russian lad with a remarkable affinity for and with animals, all join her in a series of expeditions, mostly nocturnal, through and under Manhattan. The city never comes to life the way the human characters do (Vita, for instance, “had six kinds of smile, and five of them were real”) but often does have a tangible presence, and notwithstanding Vita’s encounter with a (rather anachronistically styled) “Latina” librarian, period attitudes toward race and class are convincingly drawn. Vita, Silk, and Arkady all present white; Samuel, a Shona immigrant from Southern Rhodesia, is the only primary character of color. Santoso’s vignettes of, mostly, animals and small items add occasional visual grace notes.
Narrow squeaks aplenty combine with bursts of lyrical prose for a satisfying adventure . (Historical fiction. 11-13)Pub Date: Aug. 27, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-4814-1948-2
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 25, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2019
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