Deliberately obtrusive, busy book design all but mars this overdue collection of children's poetry and nonsense verse from a German experimental poet (d. 1914). Morgenstern's work is full of surprises; gathered here in two sections separated by a translator's note, the poems are soothing, startling, amusing, or revolting by turns, their language and sentiments as conventional as ``Spring Song''—''Winter, winter go away,/Spring is coming any day!'' or as bizarre as ``The Big Laloola,'' which is entirely gibberish: ``Hontrarooroo miromenty/zaskoo zes roo roo?/Entypenty, liyolenty,'' etc. Zwerger's illustrations, whether full page scenes or tiny figures scattered between or around the lines, display their usual delicate, impish humor, and every spread has a different look, with various backgrounds and the use of many typefaces. When poems are printed on a dark green background, or in a typeface so light in weight that the thins disappear in the coated paper's glare, it may appear that legibility has taken a back seat to layout. Still, it is the first English collection of Morgenstern's children's poetry since Great Lalula and Other Nonsense Rhymes (Putnam, 1969). Try it—at least the ``Gallows Songs'' portion—on Roald Dahl fans. (Poetry. 10-14)
Pub Date: April 1, 1995
ISBN: 1-55858-364-5
Page Count: 42
Publisher: NorthSouth
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1995
A patchy tale flickering repeatedly from light to dark and back.
Alex’s ability to talk with ghosts puts him in famous company when he and his mom move to Hannibal, Missouri.
Alex, 13, is driven by bitter determination to keep his lifelong ability secret, since it’s already led to a diagnosis of schizophrenia that drove his parents apart and cost his mother a decent job, but it’s not easy. For one thing, his new friend, Bones, is a positively obsessed amateur ghost hunter, and for another, ghosts just won’t leave him alone no matter how rudely he treats them. Notable among the latter is Mark Twain himself, as acerbic and wily as he was in life, who is on the verge of involuntarily degenerating into a raging poltergeist unless Alex can find the unspecified, titular treasure. Alex’s search takes him through Clemens’ writings and tragic private life as well as many of the town’s related attractions on the way to a fiery climax in the public library. Meanwhile, Alex has an apotheosis of his own, deciding that lying to conceal his ability and his unhappy past isn’t worth the sacrifice of a valued friendship. Conveniently for the plot’s needs, Clemens and other ghosts can interact with the physical world at will. Wolfe parlays Alex’s ingrained inability to ignore ectoplasmic accosters into some amusing cross-conversations that help lighten his protagonist’s hard inner tests. The cast, living and otherwise, presents as white.
A patchy tale flickering repeatedly from light to dark and back. (Fantasy. 11-13)Pub Date: June 1, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-940924-29-8
Page Count: 250
Publisher: Dreaming Robot
Review Posted Online: May 27, 2018
Karr (The Cave, 1994, etc.) chooses the silent film studios during WW I as a backdrop for twin adolescent film stars Fitzhugh and Nelly Dalton's discovery of a ring of German sympathizers. Although their father's suspicious death in the explosion of a munitions dump has forced the twins and their mother to move out of Manhattan, things are looking up for the scrappy family. Fitzhugh and Nelly will star in a new film serial, In the Kaiser's Clutch, written and sold to the studio by their mother. The twins eventually uncover their leading man as the brains behind a secret German bomb factory. By juxtaposing plot summaries of each serial installment at the opening of every chapter and then describing all the hard work that goes into the segments, Karr accurately recreates the early film industry, and those who can give themselves up wholeheartedly to some of the campier aspects of this will have a ball. The plot is stuffed with cornball jokes, wooden dialogue, and clichÇd happy family scenes; the German characters are reduced to thick-accented, shifty-eyed, bravado-spouting villains, and the novel ultimately becomes as jingoistic as the fictional serial at its core. (Fiction. 12-14)
Pub Date: Oct. 25, 1995
ISBN: 0-374-33638-5
Page Count: 182
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1995
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