In spite of its predictability, likely to find an appreciative audience among young teens.
Thirteen-year-old Flint, aka “Squint,” is determined to finish his comic book in time to enter it in a contest—and before he loses so much more of his eyesight that he can no longer see to draw.
Squint has a degenerative corneal disease that has left him with thick glasses that do little to correct his vision but make him a magnet for bullying by popular kids. When popular McKell reaches out to him, his first reaction is to protect himself by rejecting her. But then he discovers that she’s dealing with plenty herself; her older brother, Danny, has progeria, a rare disease that’s killing him. Danny has a popular YouTube channel in which he suggests challenges or activities designed to bring people together. After his death, the videos keep coming, serving, poignantly, to draw McKell and Squint closer as he gradually emerges from his self-imposed isolation. Squint’s comic-book tale accompanies and parallels his first-person narration, crafting a fantasy world where Squint can be the superhero of his dreams. But it’s the drawing of the comics that presents the greatest challenge to him with his poor vision. The book assumes a white default, with Squint assumed white and biracial McKell half-Filipina and presumably half-white. That Squint’s drawings are not included seems like a major missed opportunity to broaden this sometimes-maudlin tale of loss and redemption.
In spite of its predictability, likely to find an appreciative audience among young teens. (Fiction. 11-14)Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-62972-485-0
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Shadow Mountain
Review Posted Online: July 23, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2018
Clever as ever—if slow off the mark—and positively laden with tics, quirks, and puns.
When deadly minions of archvillain Ledroptha Curtain escape from prison, the talented young protégés of his twin brother, Nicholas Benedict, reunite for a new round of desperate ploys and ingenious trickery.
Stewart sets the reunion of cerebral Reynie Muldoon Perumal, hypercapable Kate Wetherall, shy scientific genius George “Sticky” Washington, and spectacularly sullen telepath Constance Contraire a few years after the previous episode, The Mysterious Benedict Society and the Prisoner’s Dilemma (2009). Providing relief from the quartet’s continual internecine squabbling and self-analysis, he trucks in Tai Li, a grubby, precociously verbal 5-year-old orphan who also happens to be telepathic. (Just to even the playing field a bit, the bad guys get a telepath too.) Series fans will know to be patient in wading through all the angst, arguments, and flurries of significant nose-tapping (occasionally in unison), for when the main action does at long last get under way—the five don’t even set out from Mr. Benedict’s mansion together until more than halfway through—the Society returns to Nomansan Island (get it?), the site of their first mission, for chases, narrow squeaks, hastily revised stratagems, and heroic exploits that culminate in a characteristically byzantine whirl of climactic twists, triumphs, and revelations. Except for brown-skinned George and olive-complected, presumably Asian-descended Tai, the central cast defaults to white; Reynie’s adoptive mother is South Asian.
Clever as ever—if slow off the mark—and positively laden with tics, quirks, and puns. (Fiction. 11-13)Pub Date: Sept. 24, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-316-45264-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Megan Tingley/Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: April 27, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A terrific premise buried beneath problem-novel tropes.
A gaggle of eighth graders find the coolest clubhouse ever.
Fulfilling the fantasies of anyone who’s ever constructed a fort in their bedroom or elsewhere, Korman hands his five middle schoolers a fully stocked bomb shelter constructed decades ago in the local woods by an eccentric tycoon and lost until a hurricane exposes the entrance. So, how to keep the hideout secret from interfering grown-ups—and, more particularly, from scary teen psychopath Jaeger Devlin? The challenge is tougher still when everyone in the central cast is saddled with something: C.J. struggles to hide injuries inflicted by the unstable stepdad his likewise abused mother persists in enabling; Jason is both caught in the middle of a vicious divorce and unable to stand up to his controlling girlfriend; Evan is not only abandoned by drug-abusing parents, but sees his big brother going to the bad thanks to Jaeger’s influence; Mitchell struggles with OCD–fueled anxieties and superstitions; and so forth. How to keep a story overtaxed with issues and conflicts from turning into a dreary slog? Spoiler alert: Neither the author nor his characters ultimately prove equal to the challenge. With the possible exception of Ricky Molina, one of the multiple narrators, everyone seems to be White.
A terrific premise buried beneath problem-novel tropes. (resources, author’s note) (Fiction. 11-13)Pub Date: June 28, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-338-62914-9
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Scholastic
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2022
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