A middle child muddles through one minor mishap after another in this Canadian author’s lightweight, low-key debut for young readers. Caught between the reckless schemes of older brother Andy, who’s forever promoting such harebrained ideas as taking a shortcut across a railway bridge, and the challenges of having a little sibling, Leonard, who is already smart enough to cozen both older brothers out of all of their Halloween loot—and to stay off that bridge—Owen’s life isn’t so much “secret” as subject to sudden complications. Though Cumyn draws his incidents, by and large, from the standard chapter-book menu—the battle with bullies, the wildly misinformed conversation about sex, the supporting cast of inept male adults, etc.—he does subject his preteen Everylad to moments of high triumph and terror. He closes with a poignant, ice-breaking encounter between Owen and classmate Sylvia, on whom he’s had a longstanding crush, on the very day she and her parents pack up to move away. It’s not exactly venturesome writing, but Hurwitz fans and other readers who prefer to stay in familiar territory will enjoy following the ups and down of this closely knit trio of siblings. (Fiction. 10-12)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-88899-506-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Groundwood
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2002
An entertaining continuation to a magical series that celebrates diversity with a magical twist.
With Rumpelstiltskin and his band of villains still on the loose, the students and staff of Fairy Tale Reform School are on high alert as they prepare for the next attack.
Classes are devoted to teaching battle techniques and conjuring new weapons, which narrator Gilly finds preferable to learning history or manners. But Maxine, her ogress friend, has had it with all the doom and gloom. The last straw is when the agenda at the Royal Lady-in-Waiting meeting is changed from “How to Plan the Perfect Fairy Garden Party” to designing flying rocks and creating flower darts. While on a class field trip to the village to investigate their future careers, Maxine finds a magic lamp housing a genie named Darlene. Her wish that everyone be happy works a little too well. War preparations are put on hold as the school fills with flowers, laughter, and plans for a musical production. But when Gilly is tapped to fill in for the local chief of the dwarf police, things really take a turn for the worse. The students, including fairies, ogres, and the part-human/part-beast offspring of Beauty and the ex-Beast, focus on friendship and supporting one another in spite of their differences. Humility, forgiveness, and loyalty are also highly regarded in the FTRS community. Human Gilly is white, but there is racial as well as species diversity at FTRS.
An entertaining continuation to a magical series that celebrates diversity with a magical twist. (Fantasy. 10-12)Pub Date: March 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-4926-5167-3
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Sourcebooks Jabberwocky
Review Posted Online: Nov. 20, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2018
Kibuishi gives his epic tale a hefty nudge toward its long-building climax while giving readers plenty of reasons to stick...
Stonekeeper Emily frees the elves from their monstrous masked ruler and sets out to rejoin her brother and mother in the series’ penultimate episode.
The multistranded storyline picks up with Emily’s return to the world of Alledia. Now a fiery, destructive phoenix struggling to regain control of her actions, Emily goes on to follow her brother Navin and allies as they battle invading shadows on the nearby world of Typhon, then switches back to human form for a climactic confrontation with the Elf King—in the course of which Emily rips off his mask to a chorus of “ERGH!! NO!!! GRAH! RRGH!! AAAGH!” to expose a rousingly hideous face. Cute animal heads on many figures (the result of a curse) and a scene with benevolent-looking trees provide at least a bit of relief from the grim expressions that all the human and humanoid elven characters almost invariably wear. But along with emphatic sound effects, the battle and action scenes in the cleanly drawn, if sometimes cramped, panels feature huge blasts of fire or energy, intricately detailed giant robots, weirdly eyeless monsters, and wild escapades aplenty to keep the pace’s pedal to the metal. Aliens and AIs in the cast come in a variety of hues, elves are a uniform gray, and except for a brief encounter between Emily and a slightly darker lad, the (uncursed) humans default to white.
Kibuishi gives his epic tale a hefty nudge toward its long-building climax while giving readers plenty of reasons to stick around for it. (Graphic fantasy. 10-12)Pub Date: Sept. 25, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-545-85002-5
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Graphix/Scholastic
Review Posted Online: July 23, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2018
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