A shrug is likely to be readers’ responses, too.
The theft of a massive diamond leads fledgling secret agent Oliver Diplexito to South Africa, where eye-opening revelations await.
The series loses juice, headway, and even coherence in this third episode, as Aurelian Binns, vengeful scion of the former head of the nefarious Woodhouselee Society, leads supposedly clever Oliver around by the nose. Binns tricks Oliver into actually helping to steal the gem, then into a chase through the Titanic (just before it sets out on its fateful voyage, which is an opportunity for drama lost if ever there was one) while the diamond heads for southern Africa. Oliver finally journeys to the diamond mines of Kimberley, where he gets filled in on the area’s growing racial oppression and turmoil and, in the course of an inconclusive dust-up, saves freedom fighter Bartholomew Hunter, an American whose parents had been enslaved, from a bullet and also from being tricked into selling the diamond to vicious white mine owners. Aside from narration (and playing Binns’ dupe), the white teenager is more observer than driver of events, so passive that he just shrugs off discoveries that both Hunter and the Woodhouselee Society figure significantly in the hidden past of his saturnine butler/mentor, Mr. Scant. In the end Methods himself apparently loses interest in his tale, not even bothering to mention whether the diamond is recovered or not.
A shrug is likely to be readers’ responses, too. (Adventure. 10-12)Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5124-0581-1
Page Count: 276
Publisher: Carolrhoda
Review Posted Online: July 15, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Readers will need to strap on their helmets and prepare for a wild ride.
Disaster overtakes a group of sixth graders on a leadership-building white-water rafting trip.
Deep in the Montana wilderness, a dam breaks, and the resultant rush sweeps away both counselors, the rafts, and nearly all the supplies, leaving five disparate preteens stranded in the wilderness far from where they were expected to be. Narrator Daniel is a mild White kid who’s resourceful and good at keeping the peace but given to worrying over his mentally ill father. Deke, also White, is a determined bully, unwilling to work with and relentlessly taunting the others, especially Mia, a Latina, who is a natural leader with a plan. Tony, another White boy, is something of a friendly follower and, unfortunately, attaches himself to Deke while Imani, a reserved African American girl, initially keeps her distance. After the disaster, Deke steals the backpack with the remaining food and runs off with Tony, and the other three resolve to do whatever it takes to get it back, eventually having to confront the dangerous bully. The characters come from a variety of backgrounds but are fairly broadly drawn; still, their breathlessly perilous situation keeps the tale moving briskly forward, with one threatening situation after another believably confronting them. As he did with Wildfire (2019), Newbery Honoree Philbrick has crafted another action tale for young readers that’s impossible to put down.
Readers will need to strap on their helmets and prepare for a wild ride. (Fiction. 10-12)Pub Date: March 2, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-338-64727-3
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Scholastic
Review Posted Online: Nov. 26, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2020
A truly #BlackGirlMagic, cloudy-day, curl-up kind of book.
Maya knows her father’s stories aren’t real—are they?
Maya, a comic-book–loving, anemic 12-year-old Black girl, is suffering through situational math when she experiences a sudden, time-stopped moment when “the color bled from the world like someone was sucking it away through a straw.” That is not the only strange incident: Maya has an all-too-real dream of a man with skin “the color of the moon” and “pale violet eyes” who has the same color-sucking ability; her structural engineer papa literally disappears in front of her; and when she and her friends Frankie and Eli find themselves fighting shape-shifting darkbringers, Frankie discovers her own light-shooting skills. What Maya, Frankie, Eli, and readers find out from Maya’s mother is that Papa’s real identity is Elegguá, the most powerful of the West African orishas, guardian of the veil between this world and those of the darkbringers and other forces. Not only that, but Frankie’s newly found gift came from her late mother, who is also an orisha, and Eli is part orisha, too. The astonishing series of subsequent revelations leaves readers agog, eager to know how Maya and her pals will use their powers to heal the veil and save their mostly Black and brown neighborhood. In her author’s note, Barron describes how this book has risen from her explorations of the traditions of her West African ancestors.
A truly #BlackGirlMagic, cloudy-day, curl-up kind of book. (Fantasy. 10-12)Pub Date: Sept. 22, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-328-63518-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: HMH Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 25, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
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