A rousing odyssey.
Not even the zombie apocalypse can keep a cat from her beloved two-legged pets.
Mounting anxiety after her 2-year-old charge, Connor, doesn’t come home from day care and the pet grown-ups go missing as well at last drives house cat Pickles to screw her courage to the sticking place and set out to the rescue. The world has turned strange, she discovers, as many humans have become vicious zombies—the slow, stupid kind, fortunately—and left the streets strewn with their half-eaten victims. Pickles is less disturbed by that (“I’m an indoor cat who watches way too much TV. My tolerance for dramatic violence might be a little messed up”) than by the annoyances of locks, doorknobs, and finding food that doesn’t run away. As she searches she faces challenges ranging from thuggish sewer rats to human fugitives hungry enough to trap and eat domestic animals…not to mention, of course, all those dangerously infectious undead. Luckily, she acquires a band of loyal sidekicks along the way, including a portly urban raccoon and a berserker hamster. Pickles’ steadfast loyalty makes her seem more doglike than feline, but she certainly has heart, and by the end she’s a long way from the shy, unadventurous kitty she began as. Misri artfully leaves gorier details to the imagination, so readers who really don’t thrill to blood and guts can focus on the adventure rather than the body parts.
A rousing odyssey. (Horror. 9-11)Pub Date: Sept. 24, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-77086-558-7
Page Count: 184
Publisher: DCB
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2019
A waggish tale with a serious (and timely) theme.
An age-old rivalry is reluctantly put aside when two young vacationers are lost in the wilderness.
Anthropomorphic—in body if definitely not behavior—Dogg Scout Oscar and pampered Molly Hissleton stray from their separate camps, meet by chance in a trackless magic forest, and almost immediately recognize that their only chance of survival, distasteful as the notion may be, lies in calling a truce. Patterson and Grabenstein really work the notion here that cooperation is better than prejudice founded on ignorance and habit, interspersing explicit exchanges on the topic while casting the squabbling pair with complementary abilities that come out as they face challenges ranging from finding food to escaping such predators as a mountain lion and a pack of vicious “weaselboars.” By the time they cross a wide river (on a raft steered by “Old Jim,” an otter whose homespun utterances are generally cribbed from Mark Twain—an uneasy reference) back to civilization, the two are BFFs. But can that friendship survive the return, with all the social and familial pressures to resume the old enmity? A climactic cage-match–style confrontation before a worked-up multispecies audience provides the answer. In the illustrations (not seen in finished form) López plops wide-eyed animal heads atop clothed, more or less human forms and adds dialogue balloons for punchlines.
A waggish tale with a serious (and timely) theme. (Fantasy. 9-11)Pub Date: April 1, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-316-41156-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Jimmy Patterson/Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Dec. 15, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2019
Funny, scary in the right moments, and offering plenty of historical facts.
Catfished…by a ghost!
Harry Mancini, an 11-year-old White boy, was born and lives in Harry Houdini’s house in New York City. It’s no surprise, then, that he’s obsessed with Houdini and his escapology. Harry and his best friend, Zeke, are goofing around in some particularly stupid ways (“Because we’re idiots,” Zeke explains later) when Harry hits his head. In the aftermath of a weeklong coma, Harry finds a mysterious gift: an ancient flip phone that has no normal phone service but receives all-caps text messages from someone who identifies himself as “HOUDINI.” Harry is wary of this unseen stranger, like any intelligently skeptical 21st-century kid, but he’s eventually convinced: His phone friend is the real deal. So when Houdini asks Harry to try one of his greatest tricks, Harry agrees. Harry—so full of facts about Houdini that he litters his storytelling with infodumps, making him an enthusiastic tour guide to Houdini’s life—is easily tricked by his supportive-seeming hero. Harry, Zeke, and Houdini are all just the right amount of snarky, and while Harry’s terrifying adventure has an occasionally inconsistent voice, the humor and tension make this an appealing page-turner. Archival photographs of Harry Houdini make the ghostly visitation feel closer. Zeke is Black, and Harry Houdini, as he was in life, is a White Jewish immigrant.
Funny, scary in the right moments, and offering plenty of historical facts. (historical note, bibliography) (Supernatural adventure. 9-11)Pub Date: March 2, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-8234-4515-8
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Holiday House
Review Posted Online: Jan. 26, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2021
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