An amusingly quirky hero’s journey—though few will be convinced that roaches belong inside the house.
A white cockroach aspires to gain acceptance by humans and become a pet, not a pest, in this debut children’s book.
In an abandoned house live many cockroaches. One, Tuodi, is different from his cohorts: He’s white, sapient, and wants to be accepted by humans. When he glimpses a human house across the intervening Jungle of Insects, Tuodi is sure that living there would be marvelous. Other roaches warn him that “humans hate us,” but Tuodi sings to himself: “I’m gonna be a pet, not a pest. I will lose the letter s.” Tuodi makes a very dangerous journey through the jungle, which is controlled by powerful ant factions. In the House of Humans, Tuodi is almost killed, but Jay Anderson, an 11-year-old boy, wants to keep him, never having seen a white roach before. When Tuodi shows off his intelligence, Jay’s parents alert the government, which subjects the roach to painful testing. He survives, becoming “more powerful and wiser than all other insects.” Devoted to the Andersons, Tuodi is helpful around the house (finding keys, removing splinters, carrying notes); he also brokers a peace agreement with other insects. As the story ends, Tuodi has become a great insect leader, but more importantly, he has become a pet. In his book (appropriate for all ages), McCants has a tough sell in trying to make a roach, even one as special as Tuodi, an appealing companion animal. As Tuodi’s kin Mooko sings, “We’re pests, we’re pests. We can make an awful mess.” And it seems paradoxical, even unhealthy, that Tuodi would dream of being “perfect in all human ways.” Why should he not want to be perfect in all roach ways? They’re an enormously successful species. That aside, the tale has eccentric charm, many moments of bravery and heroism, and humor, as when Mr. Anderson tries to alert an indifferent Department of Agriculture: “Sir, would you be interested if I said I was planning to raise thirty million of them for pets?”
An amusingly quirky hero’s journey—though few will be convinced that roaches belong inside the house.Pub Date: May 26, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-983002-20-5
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Time Tunnel Media
Review Posted Online: Sept. 15, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Less bleak than the subject matter might warrant—Hannah’s default outlook is sunny—but still, a wrenching depiction of war’s...
The traumatic homecoming of a wounded warrior.
The daughter of alcoholics who left her orphaned at 17, Jolene “Jo” Zarkades found her first stable family in the military: She’s served over two decades, first in the army, later with the National Guard. A helicopter pilot stationed near Seattle, Jo copes as competently at home, raising two daughters, Betsy and Lulu, while trying to dismiss her husband Michael’s increasing emotional distance. Jo’s mettle is sorely tested when Michael informs her flatly that he no longer loves her. Four-year-old Lulu clamors for attention while preteen Betsy, mean-girl-in-training, dismisses as dweeby her former best friend, Seth, son of Jo’s confidante and fellow pilot, Tami. Amid these challenges comes the ultimate one: Jo and Tami are deployed to Iraq. Michael, with the help of his mother, has to take over the household duties, and he rapidly learns that parenting is much harder than his wife made it look. As Michael prepares to defend a PTSD-afflicted veteran charged with Murder I for killing his wife during a dissociative blackout, he begins to understand what Jolene is facing and to revisit his true feelings for her. When her helicopter is shot down under insurgent fire, Jo rescues Tami from the wreck, but a young crewman is killed. Tami remains in a coma and Jo, whose leg has been amputated, returns home to a difficult rehabilitation on several fronts. Her nightmares in which she relives the crash and other horrors she witnessed, and her pain, have turned Jo into a person her daughters now fear (which in the case of bratty Betsy may not be such a bad thing). Jo can't forgive Michael for his rash words. Worse, she is beginning to remind Michael more and more of his homicide client. Characterization can be cursory: Michael’s earlier callousness, left largely unexplained, undercuts the pathos of his later change of heart.
Less bleak than the subject matter might warrant—Hannah’s default outlook is sunny—but still, a wrenching depiction of war’s aftermath.Pub Date: Jan. 31, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-312-57720-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Dec. 18, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2012
Back to a Jurassic Park sideshow for another immensely entertaining adventure, this fashioned from the loose ends of Crichton's 1990 bestseller. Six years after the lethal rampage that closed the primordial zoo offshore Costa Rica, there are reports of strange beasts in widely separated Central American venues. Intrigued by the rumors, Richard Levine, a brilliant but arrogant paleontologist, goes in search of what he hopes will prove a lost world. Aided by state-of- the-art equipment, Levine finds a likely Costa Rican outpostbut quickly comes to grief, having disregarded the warnings of mathematician Ian Malcolm (the sequel's only holdover character). Malcolm and engineer Doc Thorne organize a rescue mission whose ranks include mechanical whiz Eddie Carr and Sarah Harding, a biologist doing fieldwork with predatory mammals in East Africa. The party of four is unexpectedly augmented by two children, Kelly Curtis, a 13-year-old "brainer," and Arby Benton, a black computer genius, age 11. Once on the coastal island, the deliverance crew soon links up with an unchastened Levine and locates the hush-hush genetics lab complex used to stock the ill- fated Jurassic Park with triceratops, tyrannosaurs, velociraptors, etc. Meanwhile, a mad amoral scientist and his own group, in pursuit of extinct creatures for biotech experiments, have also landed on the mysterious island. As it turns out, the prehistoric fauna is hostile to outsiders, and so the good guys as well as their malefic counterparts spend considerable time running through the triple-canopy jungle in justifiable terror. The far-from-dumb brutes exact a gruesomely heavy toll before the infinitely resourceful white-hat interlopers make their final breakout. Pell-mell action and hairbreadth escapes, plus periodic commentary on the uses and abuses of science: the admirable Crichton keeps the pot boiling throughout.
Pub Date: Sept. 28, 1995
ISBN: 0-679-41946-2
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1995
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