A vibrant time-travel tale that offers inventive storytelling along with sports, romance, and secrets.
A YA adventure finds a high school football star stuck in the past thanks to a mysterious musical instrument.
North High School students Arky and Iris are twins from the accomplished Jongler-Jinks family. Their father, Howard Jinks, is a university history professor, and their mother, Dr. Octavia Jongler, is an astrophysicist. Jongler, however, has been missing without a trace for a year. In a state of continuous coping, Howard indulges his passion for the Civil War and attends a weekend re-enactment. It also happens to be the Friday night of an important semifinal football game between the North High Cyclones and the Lakeside Spartans. When the Cyclones win, Arky throws a party for his best friends, Danny Bender, a defensive back, and Matt Grinnell, the star quarterback. The party ends early when a scandal involving a private video of Kelly, Matt’s girlfriend, erupts. Matt tries to walk home but returns to knock on Iris’ door. He begs her to play the oboe, which the jock finds beautiful. Instead, she plays her cor anglais, a family heirloom that comes to possess her. Mist pours from the instrument’s bell, engulfs Matt, and causes him to vanish. Meehl (Suck It Up and Die, 2013, etc.) has crafted a sparkling tale from both unique and time-tested elements. His layered characterization unfolds wonderfully, as the narrative focus slides from the bickering twins to Matt, the talented footballer who’s begun to think he plays just to satisfy his father’s obsession with the game. The plot kicks in as the author sends Matt back in time—via the enchanted cor anglais—to 1907, when football had a different set of rules, equipment, and cultural value. Meehl’s love of history and sport combine to tell not only Matt’s story, but also Olympian Jim Thorpe’s. As a young man, Thorpe played football for the Carlisle Indian Industrial School of Pennsylvania. A bittersweet ending sets up the second volume in a trilogy.
A vibrant time-travel tale that offers inventive storytelling along with sports, romance, and secrets.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-63505-186-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Mill City Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 21, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Fun juvenile fiction with lively, precise narration and a strong tendency to allegory.
Whimsical quest fantasy.
Caught between the dependence of childhood–particularly the lack of a driver’s license–and the pubescent yearning for autonomy, 13-year-old Carrie faces another boring summer day at home. At her mother’s urging, she settles down in her father’s rock garden to tackle one of the remaining titles on her summer reading list, The Hobbit. Her reading is interrupted, however, when Earth momentarily scrapes Vale, a planet from another dimension. This improbable intergalactic event deposits Carrie on a world of talking birds, animals and insects, where her attention is immediately arrested by a shard of glowing amber that speaks to her, revealing itself to be Alma, a goddess trapped eons ago by Lucifer. To be freed, Alma needs Carrie to deliver the amberstone to Lobo, the Great Wolf Spirit, an appropriately Tolkienesque quest that Carrie readily takes up. Aided by a pill bug named Tilt and two youths from the near-utopian city of Safe Keep, Carrie faces natural disasters, ravenous predators and, most daunting of all, the prevailing view that the amberstone should be returned to Safe Keep rather than to Lobo. Finally, Carrie is forced to choose whether to listen to her instincts or to the voices of those who have helped her. Clearly an allegory about emerging from adolescence to find one’s moral compass, Carrie’s journey is dominated by two spiritual systems, one represented by the Guardians–ethereal, Miltonic angels who serve the Creator and guard Safe Keep–and the other embodied in Lobo, Alma and even the imps of Bleak Meadow. Lobo and Alma embody the intuitive and immanent portions of Carrie’s youthful identity, while the Guardians are the transcendent, superego of the adult world–how she chooses to balance these elements will say much about her path to maturity. Heavily influenced by Tolkien and Lewis Carroll, Lecoq’s promising debut is a lighthearted amusement powered by crisp and economic descriptive prose. The dialogue, unfortunately, rarely matches the quality of the narration, and this weakness dilutes the drama of Carrie’s adventures. Billed as young-adult fare, this would appeal more to an even younger audience.
Fun juvenile fiction with lively, precise narration and a strong tendency to allegory.Pub Date: July 2, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-4392-3114-2
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A well-shaped piece of exotica, full of danger, dash, allegory and love under the banana tree.
A smart, vibrant adventure romance wrapped in a quest, fashioned to touch a wide audience.
The setting for this tale is India–the India of today, but also the India of yore and that of Western imagination, with its hot colors, heavenly scents and rich mythic history. Eighteen-year-old Kelsey Hayes finds herself in the subcontinent in the company of a circus tiger she was caring for back in Oregon. The tiger, named Dhiren, is also Alagan Dhiren, Prince of Mujulaain, commonly known as Ren–but that was back in 1657 AD, the year a curse was placed on him by Lokesh, a raja greedy for wealth and power whom Ren had thwarted. Kelsey can break the curse, and that quest takes the protagonists through challenges that would make Steven Spielberg proud. Houck has a mostly steady hand with the story’s pacing, purposeful and deliberate as she takes her time to unspool colorful nuggets of Indian history and flesh out each milieu–visiting, for instance, the butler’s pantry and spice room in Ren’s house, or the elephant’s stables and the king’s balance in the fabled city of Hampi. But she drags her feet when detailing Ren and his brother’s squabbles and takes forever to make even the most demure hay between Kelsey and Ren. Still, when she does it’s sweet fun–“I have no idea how long I was kissing him like this...My bare feet were dangling several inches from the floor.” Minor missteps–what is a GPS doing in a quest?–don’t seriously detract from the fun. Houck suffuses the book with the sheer otherness of India–monkey gods, battle elephants, caste relationships, the drape of a sari and the possibility of pure magic. Readers can’t throw a brick without hitting one shape-shifter or another in these pages. Houck conveys the mysteries with ease and clarity, drawing in readers, who’ll be glad for the wide-open ending.
A well-shaped piece of exotica, full of danger, dash, allegory and love under the banana tree.Pub Date: Sept. 22, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-4392-5043-3
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
