This decidedly off-beat import combines a unique imaginary world with the flavor of traditional tales and adventure stories to create an engaging, episodic read. Born from an egg and made of wood, Barkbelly knows of no other people like him. Set apart by his strength and rapid growth, Barkbelly’s alienation increases when he causes the accidental death of a playmate. Running from retribution, he journeys to an industrial town where he finds both friendship and hardship. On the run again, he joins a circus troupe and learns about the country of his origin from one of the well-traveled performers there. Determined to find his family, Barkbelly works on a ship, survives a pirate attack, reaches his island home and, ultimately, finds where he belongs. Weatherill’s plotting is delightfully unpredictable but never unlikely. Characterization is brisk but effective and despite the unusual names, it’s easy to tell individuals apart. Like Barkbelly himself, this is a unique creation that will find favor with a small, appreciative readership. (Fiction. 10-12)
Pub Date: June 13, 2006
ISBN: 0-375-83327-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
This middle-grade read is heartfelt, but nostalgia that’s a bit too on the nose makes it hard to follow
Twelve-year-old aspiring astronaut Ebony-Grace Norfleet Freeman is lonely and homesick in New York.
When trouble hits her family like an asteroid, Ebony-Grace, aka Cadet E-Grace Starfleet, is forced to leave her beloved grandfather and her hometown of Huntsville, Alabama, to spend a week with her father in Harlem, New York—or as she calls it, “No Joke City.” Determined to ignore what she calls the “Sonic Boom,” New York’s hip-hop revolution in the early 1980s, Ebony-Grace rejects the people, music, and movements of Harlem, instead blasting off in her mind aboard the Mothership Uhura to save her grandfather, Capt. Fleet. Stuck, Ebony-Grace works to navigate a new frontier where she is teased and called “crazy” because of her imaginative intergalactic adventures. Ostracized as a flava-less, “plain ol’ ice cream sandwich! Chocolate on the outside, vanilla on the inside,” Ebony-Grace tries her best to be “regular and normal,” but her outer-space imaginings are the only things that keep her grounded. The design includes images that sho nuff bring the ’80s alive: comic-strip panels, inverted Star Wars scripting, and onomatopoeic graffiti-esque words. Unfortunately, these serve to interrupt an already-crowded narrative as readers hyperjump between Ebony-Grace’s imagination and the movement of life in the real world, transmitted via news reports and subway memorials.
This middle-grade read is heartfelt, but nostalgia that’s a bit too on the nose makes it hard to follow . (Historical fiction. 10-12)Pub Date: Aug. 27, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-399-18735-3
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: May 7, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2019
A determined nonreader suffers toxic exposure to genre fiction when a bookcase falls on his head. Reluctantly agreeing to help set up a display in his school’s media center, Trip Dinkleman blacks out beneath a shower of volumes—and wakes up (in a new chapter titled “Horror”) outside an eerie haunted house. About to have his face cut off at the command of leering Professor Psycho, Trip suddenly finds himself in “Sports Fiction,” carrying the ball in the Super Bowl. So it goes, each new chapter starting with the previous one’s last line, through Adventure, Humor, Mystery and the rest of the roster. After a riotously over-the-top Fantasy quest (“I am Hockaloogie, …a wise and mystical sage who occasionally speaks in old English and refuses to give away plot details for his own mysterious reasons”) and a horrifying stint as a female in Fiction for Girls, Trip comes to and discovers that his negative attitude toward reading has been thoroughly spoiled. Gutman has way too much fun here, and reading-assignment-weary young readers will, too. (Fantasy and everything else. 10-12)
Pub Date: July 29, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-4169-2438-8
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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