A brainy, action-packed fantasy outing even more complex and sophisticated than series opener Foundry’s Edge (2015)....
Phoebe Plumm and Micah Tanner bravely search for the mysterious Occulyth, which they hope will resolve all of their challenges in this second of the Books of Ore.
Phoebe blames herself for the loss of her father, Dr. Jules Plumm, a former key employee of the Foundry, the powerful Meridian-based technology company that exploits the metal creatures of Mehk. Meanwhile the Covenant, the resistance army made up of disaffected mehkans, is fighting back against the Foundry’s imperialism and looking to Phoebe and Micah to help. Phoebe, who turns 13 in this installment, is thrust into the limelight, seeking an illuminated path and wondering how to act around ardent warriors who treat her like a saint. Baity and Zelkowicz, both animators, enter into some heavy-duty worldbuilding in this volume, complete with an origin story, new allies and enemies, and an extensive original vocabulary. They even create a whole religion—including excerpts from Scripture—that is refreshingly female-dominated. The novel explores themes of political, environmental, and even spiritual plundering as well as what it means to be Waybound. Phoebe insists: “People will change….They’ll have to.”
A brainy, action-packed fantasy outing even more complex and sophisticated than series opener Foundry’s Edge (2015). (glossary) (Fantasy. 11-14)Pub Date: April 12, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4231-6239-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Disney-Hyperion
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2016
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
Promising elements aplenty, but they never fully mesh or deliver more than a passing chill.
Cryptic clues in a Web comic put a Seattle teenager onto the trail of a deranged kidnapper and his victim.
Three years after the (supposed) drowning of bosom friend Libby, 16-year-old May is shocked to see new stickers and other merch for “Princess X,” an intrepid swordswoman in a puff-sleeved dress and sneakers that she and Libby had privately invented in fifth grade. The princess’s recently posted online adventures tell a scary tale about escaping from a “Needle Man” years after being stolen as a replacement for his own dead daughter. They leave May convinced that Libby is still alive—hiding out from her clever, relentless captor and imbedding veiled messages in the comic that only May would catch. Said hints lead May and Trick, a hacker dude she goes to for help, on a quest through the city’s seedier and underground quarters to encounters with Jackdaw (a gay, goth Robin Hood) and a desperate scheme to steal proof of the Needle Man’s perfidy. Priest cranks the suspense somewhat by casting the kidnapper as both an IT expert and a killer, but because he mostly appears only in the emotionally charged, sparely drawn purple-and-black comics pages that Ciesemier scatters through the tale’s first two-thirds, he remains, at best, a shadowy bogeyman.
Promising elements aplenty, but they never fully mesh or deliver more than a passing chill. (Thriller. 11-14)Pub Date: May 26, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-545-62085-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Levine/Scholastic
Review Posted Online: March 2, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2015
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