A quirky and engaging crossroads for fans of baseball, the Civil War, and time travel.
In this YA sequel, twins embroil themselves in further time-travel high jinks while searching for their mother.
Astrophysicist Dr. Octavia Jongler has been lost in time for over a year. Her twins, North High School juniors Iris and Arky Jongler-Jinks, possess the device that sent her to another era—an enchanted cor anglais, or English horn. While Iris experiments with the instrument to learn more about their mother’s location, Arky focuses on his college application essay. He travels with his father, history professor Howard Jinks, to Fredericksburg, Virginia, for a Civil War re-enactment that may inspire his essay. Later, in a baseball game between North High and City High, Arky’s friend Danny Bender accidentally hits former classmate Rafael Santeiro in the head with a pitch. After a brawl between the teams ends the game, a gang of City High teens hunts for Danny at his dad’s junkyard. Iris, meanwhile, believes that finding her mother’s journal (The Book of Twins) and a disc of grenadilla wood proves that the cor anglais is about to work its magic again. As Arky rushes to save Danny from Rafael’s friends, Howard catches Iris handling the instrument. He asks her to play it—in memory of Octavia—and as she does, its mists cocoon Arky and Danny, sending them back to 1863. In his energetically plotted sequel, Meehl (Blowback ’07, 2016) once again merges his love of history and sports for a winsome adventure. Nevertheless, upon finding soldiers encamped in 1863, Arky compares them to the enthusiasts back home and sees “gaunt masks of darkened hide or unruly whiskers that veiled the face-carving effects of war.” But overall, Meehl weighs his narrative in favor of baseball, not war, exploring the game’s early days of Massachusetts rules, which involved overhand pitching and “plugging” runners with the ball. In the present, Iris and a boy named Matt Grinnell begin an adorably awkward courtship as only a music nerd and a jock can. Hints regarding Octavia persist, but locating her won’t matter if Arky damages the Jongler-Jinks lineage. A perfect cliffhanger blows readers toward the next installment.
A quirky and engaging crossroads for fans of baseball, the Civil War, and time travel.Pub Date: Sept. 28, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-59330-937-4
Page Count: 419
Publisher: Twisco Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 13, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
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