Then what? Readers who plummet off this cliff will hope there are no sharks circling below.
Pirates! Bullies! Murder and mayhem! Family secrets! Seventeenth-century England to Cape Verde and the Caribbean! But no ending.
Debut novelist Eames commits a cardinal sin by ending his story without a resolution. It opens well, however, with our hero and a bully and a fistful of horse manure. Said hero is Kitto, 12 years old, clubfooted, about to discover that his last name is different from what he thought, that his deceased mother had a dark and complicated past and that his uncle is a pirate. Kitto’s father, a cooper, is murdered, and Kitto kills his attacker, then is off to sail with his uncle after his stepmother and adored little brother are kidnapped. The characters are not so much developed as moved like chess pieces: hidden treasure, scary tattoos, a treacherous friend with a pet monkey, a rescued slave, a climactic ship-to-ship battle with circling sharks. Things are dropped in: an intricately inlaid dagger that belonged to Kitto’s mother; his Quaker stepmother’s premonition of what might be magic in him; adult sailors following a 12-year-olds’ orders. Sometimes the language is clunky or awkward. It does, however, draw readers in, at least until the last pages, where Kitto lands after his clubfoot is bitten off by one of those sharks, and his companions are about to cauterize it.
Then what? Readers who plummet off this cliff will hope there are no sharks circling below. (glossary) (Adventure. 8-12)Pub Date: May 10, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-4424-2311-4
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Paula Wiseman/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: April 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
Timely and pointed.
A Chinese girl moves to America to be reunited with her family.
When she was 5, Lina’s parents and baby sister left her in Beijing with her grandmother. Now she arrives in Southern California as a 10-year-old stranger to her own family. And what of the American dream? Her scientist father toils (sans green card) for a villainous, bigoted organic farmer, while her mother, unemployed since the pandemic put the nail salon where she worked out of business, makes bath bombs to sell online. They live in a one-bedroom apartment whose back rent is due in six weeks. Why isn’t Lina in any of the pictures displayed in their home? School is worse. Bullied by mean girls for her English, she vows never to speak again. But with the help of her ELL teacher, the school librarian, and a new friend, Lina begins to find her confidence and her voice through reading. Yang covers a lot of ground, from immigrant experiences and socio-economic inequities to climate change and middle school angst. The plotline that really stands out, however, is when Lina discovers that books can comfort the struggling, link people together, and create changes both internal and external. This theme propels the action through the book’s satisfying climax when she must decide whether to use her voice to stop a book that she loves from being banned in her classroom.
Timely and pointed. (Fiction. 8-12)Pub Date: Feb. 28, 2023
ISBN: 978-1-5344-8833-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Nov. 28, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2022
Compelling and accessible.
Steven must fight for his own life as well as for his baby brother’s when he’s offered a chance to exchange human life for something better.
Steve has figured out strategies to cope with many of his anxieties and OCD behaviors, but this summer the pressure is on. Readers see through Steve’s eyes his parents' fears for the new baby, whose congenital health issues are complicated and unusual. Readers may find parallels with Skelligin the sibling anxiety and the odd encounter with a winged creature—but here the stranger is part of something sinister indeed. “We’ve come to help,” assures the winged, slightly ethereal being who offers a solution to Steven in a dream. “We come when people are scared or in trouble. We come when there’s grief.” Oppel deftly conveys the fear and dislocation that can overwhelm a family: there’s the baby born with problems, the ways that affects the family, and Steve’s own struggles to feel and be normal. Everything feels a bit skewed, conveying the experience of being in transition from the familiar to the threateningly unfamiliar. Klassen’s several illustrations in graphite, with their linear formality and stillness and only mere glimpses of people, nicely express this sense of worry and tension. Steve’s battle with the enemy is terrifying, moving from an ominous, baleful verbal conflict to a pitched, physical, life-threatening battle.
Compelling and accessible. (Fantasy. 9-12)Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4814-3232-0
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: July 14, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2015
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