Very mighty indeed.
A comic-book riff on the classic tale of “Jack and the Beanstalk,” in which an impoverished young boy learns that his new garden has a mind of its own.
Jack certainly doesn't have an easy life: with past-due notices piling up, his mother works all the time, leaving him to care for his nearly mute autistic sister, Maddy. One fateful day at a flea market, he happens upon a vendor (whom fans of Hatke's Zita the Spacegirl will immediately recognize) who offers him a mysterious box of seeds in exchange for his mother's car. Maddy and Jack accept his deal and quickly discover that these seeds are anything but ordinary—they are magical and dangerous. Joined by his home-schooled neighbor Lilly, the white children spend their summer learning the quirks and magic of the garden until they unearth an evil lurking within it. Hatke is a master visual storyteller; through sparse, carefully chosen text, his largely image-based story enthralls from one action-packed panel to the next. His interpretation of the familiar fairy tale is richly imagined, giving girls—including one on the spectrum—equal weight in the adventure rather than staying true to the male-dominated original. This first in a series flourishes up to its nail-biting cliffhanger: expect interest for the subsequent offering to positively bloom.
Very mighty indeed. (Graphic fantasy. 7-13)Pub Date: Sept. 6, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-62672-264-4
Page Count: 208
Publisher: First Second
Review Posted Online: July 1, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
If it were a Golden Age comic, this tale of ridiculous science, space dogs and humanoid aliens with flashlights in their hands might not be bad. Alas... Number Four is a fugitive from the planet Lorien, which is sloppily described as both "hundreds of lightyears away" and "billions of miles away." Along with eight other children and their caretakers, Number Four escaped from the Mogadorian invasion of Lorien ten years ago. Now the nine children are scattered on Earth, hiding. Luckily and fairly nonsensically, the planet's Elders cast a charm on them so they could only be killed in numerical order, but children one through three are dead, and Number Four is next. Too bad he's finally gained a friend and a girlfriend and doesn't want to run. At least his newly developing alien powers means there will be screen-ready combat and explosions. Perhaps most idiotic, "author" Pittacus Lore is a character in this fiction—but the first-person narrator is someone else entirely. Maybe this is a natural extension of lightly hidden actual author James Frey's drive to fictionalize his life, but literature it ain't. (Science fiction. 11-13)
Pub Date: Aug. 17, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-06-196955-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2010
Ideas abound, but when the focus shifts from Thomas' determination to take the measure of the house (literally and...
Dies Drear? Ohio abolitionist, keeper of a key station on the Underground Railroad, bearer of a hypercharged name that is not even noted as odd. Which is odd: everything else has an elaborate explanation.
Unlike Zeely, Miss Hamilton's haunting first, this creates mystery only to reveal sleight-of-hand, creates a character who's larger than life only to reveal his double. Thirteen-year-old Thomas Small is fascinated, and afraid, of the huge, uncharted house his father, a specialist in Negro Civil War history, has purposefully rented. A strange pair of children, tiny Pesty and husky Mac Darrow, seem to tease him; old bearded Pluto, long-time caretaker and local legend, seems bent on scaring the Smalls away. But how can a lame old man run fast enough to catch Thomas from behind? what do the triangles affixed to their doors signify? who spread a sticky paste of foodstuffs over the kitchen? Pluto, accosted, disappears. . . into a cavern that was Dies Drear's treasure house of decorative art, his solace for the sequestered slaves. But Pluto is not, despite his nickname, the devil; neither is he alone; his actor-son has returned to help him stave off the greedy Darrows and the Smalls, if they should also be hostile to the house, the treasure, the tradition. Pluto as keeper of the flame would be more convincing without his, and his son's, histrionics, and without Pesty as a prodigy cherubim. There are some sharp observations of, and on, the Negro church historically and presently, and an aborted ideological debate regarding use of the Negro heritage.
Ideas abound, but when the focus shifts from Thomas' determination to take the measure of the house (literally and figuratively), the story becomes a charade. (Mystery. 8-12)Pub Date: Sept. 9, 1968
ISBN: 1416914056
Page Count: 260
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1968
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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