The author of The Deep Freeze of Bartholomew Tullock (2008) again wastes a promising premise on a tale shot through with weak logic, wooden dialogue and inconsistent characterizations. Having recruited a creature who can extract and absorb the special qualities of others, villainous mediocrity Fortescue has set out to rob all the human prodigies of the world—somehow persuading his monster to hand over the talents (which resemble Easter eggs when drawn from their owners’ heads) rather than consume them itself. This nefarious scheme is dealt a severe setback when the creature deprives sulky teenager Cressida Bloom of her extraordinary singing voice, and Cressida’s astonishingly thick-skinned, supposedly no-talent little brother Adam sets out to get it back. Along the way Adam collects two of Fortescue’s adult victims, whose budding romance provides a welcome distraction from the lumbering plot and meant-to-be-funny-but-not lines like, “You make me feel strangely uneasy, as if I’ve just eaten a moldy sandwich and I’m waiting for the ill effects to kick in.” With massive reworking, the film version, purportedly in the early stages of development, might be salvageable. (Fantasy. 11-13)
Pub Date: June 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-399-25278-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Philomel
Review Posted Online: Jan. 21, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
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
Low in physical violence, while being rich in moral and ethical issues, as well as in appealingly complex characters and...
Pub Date: March 1, 2007
ISBN: 0-316-05777-0
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Megan Tingley/Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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