A jumble of contrived events and nonsensical details, this book is neither suspenseful enough to work as drama nor funny...
Two London teens train to escort souls into the afterlife in this thoroughly muddled fantasy.
They have been recruited by Mr. October, a master of disguise given to both cryptic hints and long-winded background explanations. Ben goes out each night either to an office to type the names of the dead onto file cards in the magically disguised “Ministry of Pandemonium” or into the streets with psychic classmate Becky to escort the city’s newly minted ghosts through a shining doorway. This latter task is complicated by the menacing Lords of Sundown—a diverse group of baddies with the vague agenda of bringing “disorder and chaos to the world.” They achieve this by both kidnapping confused spirits and sucking out the souls of the living like (as Mr. October puts it) “industrial-strength vacuum cleaners of doom.” When Ben pockets a card with his own mother’s name on it, Mr. October saves his job with a transparent switcheroo, but the lad’s failure to follow proper procedure somehow lets the Lords of Sundown into the Ministry for a climactic battle. Ben's filing expertise is key to overcoming them.
A jumble of contrived events and nonsensical details, this book is neither suspenseful enough to work as drama nor funny enough to be a sendup. (Fantasy. 11-13)Pub Date: July 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-545-39919-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Scholastic
Review Posted Online: April 10, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2012
A paint-by-numbers effort to market a spinoff that’s likely to be equally ephemeral.
In a prequel to an upcoming Disney Channel film, the offspring of four familiar villains bond in an effort to impress their evil parents.
Having grown to adolescence in exile beneath a magic-banishing dome on the titular island, Mal, Carlos, Jay, and Evie—the children of, respectively, Maleficent, Cruella De Vil, Jafar, and Snow White’s Evil Queen—set out to fetch Maleficent’s staff from her Forbidden Fortress. Along with having to pass riddle and other tests clumsily designed to get them to admit the banality of their parents’ values, the quest forces the young would-be baddies to cooperate and even to moderate their ’tudes. De la Cruz turns the quest and its interminable buildup into a wordy string of trite situations in which every character trait is carefully explained lest readers miss something: “Lonely, Mal thought. I was lonely. And so were they. Evie, with her beauty-obsessed mother; Carlos, with his screeching harpy of a parent; Jay, the happy-go-lucky thief with a quick wit and dashing smile, who could steal anything in the world except his father’s heart.” Meanwhile, over in the United States of Auradon, Prince Ben, son of King Beast and Queen Belle, chafes at his lack of life choices and with an impulsive but unspecified notion at the end serves up a teaser for the film.
A paint-by-numbers effort to market a spinoff that’s likely to be equally ephemeral. (Fantasy. 11-13)Pub Date: May 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4847-2097-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Disney-Hyperion
Review Posted Online: March 31, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Leaps the tottering stack of similar “sidekick” novels in a single bound.
Disquieting revelations await a fledgling teenager at superhero school.
After Evan horns in on a super beat down between A-list archnemeses Capt. Commanding and Spartanicus shortly after his 13th birthday and against all odds survives, he wakes up enrolled in Hero High with—a dream come true—a set of variously useful new powers ranging from superhealing to supersnarky banter. Outfitted with a stylish costume and the moniker Meerkat, he delightedly joins a set of new roommates for classes like “Combat with Dinnerware” and “Bantering Basics.” But the dream takes on a nightmarish cast when his intern assignment hooks him up with Foxman, once a respected hero but now a depressed recovering alcoholic. Moreover, he learns that the whole Masks vs. Hoods thing isn’t an ongoing battle between heroes and villains at all but a secret government project with unusually vicious internal policy conflicts. Nor is there any clear distinction between good guys and bad. Still, Evan keeps his idealism intact and ultimately lands on his feet even as he works his way through thorny family and loyalty issues. Readers will savor his triumph as well as the melodramatic plot and the cast’s rib-tickling array of “metahumans,” including the unfortunately named Hotflash, HeartBurn, the dangerous Fromagier (Evan: “Sweet barking cheese, Foxman!”), and the shape- and gender-shifting Blur.
Leaps the tottering stack of similar “sidekick” novels in a single bound. (Superhero fantasy. 11-13)Pub Date: Aug. 4, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-250-03926-2
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Feiwel & Friends
Review Posted Online: March 31, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2015
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