An inventive adventure that may appeal to fans of Jasper Fforde’s work.
A teenage girl travels back in time to solve a mystery involving William Shakespeare’s plays in Douglas’ (Lancelot and Guinevere, 2016, etc.) YA fantasy novel.
Fifteen-year-old Beth Owens is a talented American actor with a passion for the Bard, and she plans to play Puck in her summer camp’s production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. However, during rehearsal, everyone’s horrified when her fellow actor’s ears transform into donkey’s ears after she speaks her lines. Soon, a mysterious stranger in the audience tells Beth the magic words to return the actor's ears to normal. For the next play, her teacher, Portia Desdemona Capulet, suggests that Beth direct a performance of Macbeth. The night of the performance, the stranger returns and reveals that he’s the famed wizard Merlin. He says that he once assisted Shakespeare himself, and now he needs Beth’s help to locate the playwright’s lost play about King Arthur. Using an independent-study project as a cover story, Beth spends her days traveling back in time, following clues in Shakespeare’s works as she searches for the missing play. Along the way, she befriends Mercutio (a real person here, later made famous in Romeo and Juliet) and witnesses a battle featuring King Henry V of England. She soon discovers that King Richard III also wants to locate the play and that he’ll stop at nothing to do so. This latest novel from Douglas is an engaging literary fantasy bolstered by an appealing heroine and a lively premise. Beth is a dynamic protagonist, and the scenes in which she discovers she possesses magical powers are brief but effective, particularly in a scene in which an actor transforms into a tree during a performance of Macbeth. Douglas weaves connections between Shakespeare and the legend of King Arthur throughout the story and includes a provocative parallel between King Richard III and Mordred, the man who killed King Arthur. A couple of misspelled names prove distracting, though; actors Katharine Hepburn and Ian McKellen are referred to as “Katherine Hepburn” and “Ian MacKellen,” respectively.
An inventive adventure that may appeal to fans of Jasper Fforde’s work.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 360
Publisher: Hermione Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 7, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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