Despite starting slowly, this dream-world fantasy encourages readers to exercise critical and creative thinking.
A kidnapped boy and girl discover that their dreams contain clues for an escape plan.
This middle-grade fantasy sequel about a young boy named Sandy, who visits a “dream space” called the Knight School, contains a worthwhile message. Dreams and even nightmares can be a conduit to problem-solving. But readers may wonder what the book’s title has to do with the story’s beginning. Over several expository pages, Randall introduces Sandy’s pooch, Mr. Tweed, describing the canine’s background and idiosyncrasies. As a dog story, it is well written and entertaining. As a stage-setter for what turns out to be Mr. Tweed’s involvement in later events, it is too lengthy a prelude to an adventure that doesn’t begin in earnest until Chapter 5, when Sandy is captured by a pair of bungling kidnappers. This narrative delay also encompasses an introduction to Sandy’s huge, old house in Boston’s Beacon Hill, seemingly meant to establish a mysterious atmosphere. Yet the house is not integral to the plot, and there’s too much information about squirrels (although Sandy’s dream about the animals proves to be significant). But if readers stay with the tale, they’ll find the momentum picks up when Sandy’s dramatic kidnapping leads to his return to the Knight School (introduced in the author’s 2007 series opener, The Dream Wizard Conquers His Knight Mare), where a cadre of sleeping kids meets. There, a benevolent adult named Reed Sundance helps them interpret elements in their dreams that can provide solutions to predicaments in their waking lives. “Dreaming is like a storm in your mind. You can spin up lots of new ways of thinking,” Reed says. When a girl Sandy meets at the Knight School turns out to be a fellow abductee, they mine their dreams for ways to thwart their kidnappers. These are more convenient than credible, but many readers will find value in Randall’s guide to thinking differently about dreams and demystifying nightmares. The text is accompanied by several full-page illustrations pleasantly rendered in pencil by Lovely.
Despite starting slowly, this dream-world fantasy encourages readers to exercise critical and creative thinking.Pub Date: Jan. 12, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-64803-910-2
Page Count: 94
Publisher: Westwood Books Publishing
Review Posted Online: Nov. 15, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
An absorbing fantasy centered on a resilient female protagonist facing growth, change, and self-empowerment.
In Florence’s middle-grade fantasy novel, a young girl’s heart is tested in the face of an evil, spreading Darkness.
Eleven-year-old Lydia, “freckle-cheeked and round-eyed, with hair the color of pine bark and fair skin,” is struggling with the knowledge that she has reached the age to apprentice as an herbalist. Lydia is reluctant to leave her beloved, magical Mulberry Glen and her cozy Housetree in the woods—she’ll miss Garder, the Glen’s respected philosopher; her fairy guardian Pit; her human friend Livy; and even the mischievous part-elf, part-imp, part-human twins Zale and Zamilla. But the twins go missing after hearing of a soul-sapping Darkness that has swallowed a forest and is creeping into minds and engulfing entire towns. They have secretly left to find a rare fruit that, it is said, will stop the Darkness if thrown into the heart of the mountain that rises out of the lethal forest. Lydia follows, determined to find the twins before they, too, fall victim to the Darkness. During her journey, accompanied by new friends, she gradually realizes that she herself has a dangerous role to play in the quest to stop the Darkness. In this well-crafted fantasy, Florence skillfully equates the physical manifestation of Darkness with the feelings of insecurity and powerlessness that Lydia first struggles with when thinking of leaving the Glen. Such negative thoughts grow more intrusive the closer she and her friends come to the Darkness—and to Lydia’s ultimate, powerfully rendered test of character, which leads to a satisfyingly realistic, not quite happily-ever-after ending. Highlights include a delightfully haunting, reality-shifting library and a deft sprinkling of Latin throughout the text; Pit’s pet name for Lydia is mea flosculus (“my little flower”). Fine-lined ink drawings introducing each chapter add a pleasing visual element to this well-grounded fairy tale.
An absorbing fantasy centered on a resilient female protagonist facing growth, change, and self-empowerment.Pub Date: Jan. 7, 2025
ISBN: 9781956393095
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Waxwing Books
Review Posted Online: Oct. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The three way chats, in which they are joined by other animals, about web spinning, themselves, other humans—are as often...
A successful juvenile by the beloved New Yorker writer portrays a farm episode with an imaginative twist that makes a poignant, humorous story of a pig, a spider and a little girl.
Young Fern Arable pleads for the life of runt piglet Wilbur and gets her father to sell him to a neighbor, Mr. Zuckerman. Daily, Fern visits the Zuckermans to sit and muse with Wilbur and with the clever pen spider Charlotte, who befriends him when he is lonely and downcast. At the news of Wilbur's forthcoming slaughter, campaigning Charlotte, to the astonishment of people for miles around, spins words in her web. "Some Pig" comes first. Then "Terrific"—then "Radiant". The last word, when Wilbur is about to win a show prize and Charlotte is about to die from building her egg sac, is "Humble". And as the wonderful Charlotte does die, the sadness is tempered by the promise of more spiders next spring.
The three way chats, in which they are joined by other animals, about web spinning, themselves, other humans—are as often informative as amusing, and the whole tenor of appealing wit and pathos will make fine entertainment for reading aloud, too.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 1952
ISBN: 978-0-06-026385-0
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1952
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
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