As satisfying and enjoyable as a big-budget animated sci-fi feature.
A year after the worst day in Luke’s life, a chance encounter in the forest sparks a grand adventure.
Luke and his older brother, Kyle, are playing in the woods when a gang of bullies causes an accident that leaves Kyle dead and Luke without his brother and best friend. A year later, a flash in the forest leads the white boy to a strange device that clamps onto his forearm. Then, chased by a mummy, a skeleton in a spacesuit, and “vampire Napoleon,” Luke is rescued by an equally odd team: a robot Abe Lincoln, an Asian-featured ghost named Artemis, a dinosaur named Zinc, and Doc—the white inventor who, it turns out, invented the device on Luke’s arm. The mummy, skeleton and Napoleon are after the device, which facilitates access to the multiverse. To evade them, Luke and his new friends shift to an alternate Earth where spiders the size of humans inhabit what looks like the Old West. With the bad guys on their trail, can the good guys rescue a kidnapped Abe Lincoln and keep the device out of the hands of their pursuers’ diabolical boss? Grine’s time-and-space adventure is a full-color, action-stuffed tale with plenty of slapstick and sarcastic humor. Luke’s ragtag new acquaintances are an interesting bunch, and the villains are suitably silly and sinister.
As satisfying and enjoyable as a big-budget animated sci-fi feature. (Graphic science fiction. 9-12)Pub Date: May 30, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-545-92659-1
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Graphix/Scholastic
Review Posted Online: March 5, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2017
Cardboard.
Zebrafish, the plucky band of do-gooder musical misfits, returns in a sophomore offering ready for a summer of camp, video games, first jobs and art.
Picking up where Zebrafish (2010) left off, Vita, Tanya, Plinko, Jay and Walt are just beginning a very different summer together. Plinko and Tanya are off to work as counselors-in-training at an arts camp, while Jay and Walt will be working on a library’s bookmobile—leaving Vita to wallow about trying to figure out what to do. With no gigs for Zebrafish on the horizon, some members of the group decide to enter a “Strings of Fury” (a fictional cousin of “Rock Band”) video game contest. Unlike its predecessor, which concentrated mainly on Vita’s experience, this plot focuses on Tanya’s and Plinko’s time at the camp. In remission from her leukemia, Tanya befriends Scott, a diabetic fellow camper, who will not only become a good friend, but may just be their necessary secret weapon in the “Strings of Fury” contest. A diverse cast of characters pulls the narrative in different directions, but then it just flops about. The one-dimensionality of the art and the story makes it feel relentlessly vanilla. There is little excitement here, a sad fate for a promising summer-camp yarn.
Cardboard. (Graphic fiction. 9-12)Pub Date: June 4, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4169-9708-5
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Atheneum
Review Posted Online: April 9, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
Lots of excitement and comfy predictability for readers willing to go with the unlikely flow.
On a heavily polluted future Earth, a group of orphans battles to bring down the evil industrialist who killed their scientist parents. P.S., they also save the planet.
The tale displays a fine disregard for internal logic but provides action and banter aplenty. It takes young Phoebe and five chance-met friends whose parents all died in the same “accident” from durance vile in an orphanage/workhouse to a somehow-hidden moonlet for adventures and then back to Boston for an explosive assault on the headquarters of archvillain Hayden Craven. Both the figures and the violence in Rawlings’ easy-to-read panels are of the cartoon sort, and generous helpings of comedy—much of it provided by Phoebe’s histrionic (“WE’RE GOING TO STARVE OUT HERE, PEOPLE!!”) robot sidekick, Max—lighten the tone. The it’s-all-good resolution leaves Craven behind bars, humanity liberated from crowded habitat domes by the discovery of a new, unspecified source of renewable power and the orphans rewarded with a spacious home on the aforementioned planetoid.
Lots of excitement and comfy predictability for readers willing to go with the unlikely flow. (Graphic science fiction. 10-12)Pub Date: July 1, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-545-37097-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Graphix/Scholastic
Review Posted Online: April 30, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2013
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