This enthusiastic but clichéd series opener strings trope after trope on a thread of purple prose. On their 13th birthday, Diello and Cynthe impatiently await the manifestation of their magical gifts. These twins are Faelin, which means half Fae (on Mamee’s side) and half human (on Pa’s), and they have “coppery, green-flecked eyes” (natch). On an errand, the twins face not just the usual Faelin-hating prejudice but real danger; then they meet a talking golden wolf and return home to find their parents murdered, the farm sacked and old family secrets emerging. A hidden (and broken) sword, a gift of Sight, an endangered younger sister and a beckoning quest complete the picture. Earthy farm details (“We needed the rain, but it hit too hard. Mind that you lift the seedlings off the mud”) mix awkwardly with the glistening stuff of Fae (“When [Mamee] was very happy, she sometimes let her glamour appear, turning her into a glittering creature of silvery sparkles, her skin like snow, her lashes like tiny crystals”). The author tries to paint a unique world with slight alterations of recognizable English words (trees are “walner,” “chesternut” and “willuth”), but the exposition is clumsy, and momentum is weakened by overexplanation (“Amalina screamed. A cry of sheer terror”). It's not subtle, but it will carry along some readers on the prose’s pure eagerness. (Fantasy. 11-13)
Pub Date: April 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-7614-5828-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Marshall Cavendish
Review Posted Online: April 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2011
If it were a Golden Age comic, this tale of ridiculous science, space dogs and humanoid aliens with flashlights in their hands might not be bad. Alas... Number Four is a fugitive from the planet Lorien, which is sloppily described as both "hundreds of lightyears away" and "billions of miles away." Along with eight other children and their caretakers, Number Four escaped from the Mogadorian invasion of Lorien ten years ago. Now the nine children are scattered on Earth, hiding. Luckily and fairly nonsensically, the planet's Elders cast a charm on them so they could only be killed in numerical order, but children one through three are dead, and Number Four is next. Too bad he's finally gained a friend and a girlfriend and doesn't want to run. At least his newly developing alien powers means there will be screen-ready combat and explosions. Perhaps most idiotic, "author" Pittacus Lore is a character in this fiction—but the first-person narrator is someone else entirely. Maybe this is a natural extension of lightly hidden actual author James Frey's drive to fictionalize his life, but literature it ain't. (Science fiction. 11-13)
Pub Date: Aug. 17, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-06-196955-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2010
Ebulliently original.
Who can't love a story about a Nigerian-American 12-year-old with albinism who discovers latent magical abilities and saves the world?
Sunny lives in Nigeria after spending the first nine years of her life in New York. She can't play soccer with the boys because, as she says, "being albino made the sun my enemy," and she has only enemies at school. When a boy in her class, Orlu, rescues her from a beating, Sunny is drawn in to a magical world she's never known existed. Sunny, it seems, is a Leopard person, one of the magical folk who live in a world mostly populated by ignorant Lambs. Now she spends the day in mundane Lamb school and sneaks out at night to learn magic with her cadre of Leopard friends: a handsome American bad boy, an arrogant girl who is Orlu’s childhood friend and Orlu himself. Though Sunny's initiative is thin—she is pushed into most of her choices by her friends and by Leopard adults—the worldbuilding for Leopard society is stellar, packed with details that will enthrall readers bored with the same old magical worlds. Meanwhile, those looking for a touch of the familiar will find it in Sunny's biggest victories, which are entirely non-magical (the detailed dynamism of Sunny's soccer match is more thrilling than her magical world saving).
Ebulliently original. (Fantasy. 11-13)Pub Date: April 14, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-670-01196-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2011
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