Holly returns to the alternate realm that she can only reach from a holiday cottage.
It’s been a year since Midwesterner Holly first visited Anglielle during summer vacation in England (The Key and the Flame, 2013). Finally she’s back at the cottage, impatient to reach the magical land where she plays an important role that she doesn’t understand. As “the last Adept,” Holly’s “a being of great magical power”—power that she doesn’t know how to wield. Anglielle has an evil king and sorcerer, back story, and an ample supply of fantastical creatures—from Ranulf the centaur to Áedán the salamander, a fire elemental who lives on Holly’s shoulder and protects her. Holly also has a familiar, a black cat who speaks and is “forever loyal to her.” Readers who nuzzle up to these wish-fulfillment animals will happily accept that Holly feels more at home in Anglielle than in suburban America and that she has a “special purpose.” Readers craving solidity will be bored by Holly’s lack of agency and a pervasive vagueness in the rules of magic (which tends to happen “somehow”) and travel (ships sink into the forest floor to reach oceans). Dialect is overdone: “when the veil ’twixt the worlds is thinnest, we’ll call her and she’ll have ter come, innit?” A focus on water (as physical setting and magical element) isn’t enough to wash away blurry worldbuilding and meandering length.
Generic. (Fantasy. 8-12)Pub Date: June 23, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4424-5744-7
Page Count: 384
Publisher: McElderry
Review Posted Online: March 25, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2015
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BOOK REVIEW
Zipping back and forth in time atop outsized robo–bell bottoms, mad inventor Tippy Tinkletrousers (aka Professor Poopypants) legs his way to center stage in this slightly less-labored continuation of episode 9.
The action commences after a rambling recap and a warning not to laugh or smile on pain of being forced to read Sarah Plain and Tall. Pilkey first sends his peevish protagonist back a short while to save the Earth (destroyed in the previous episode), then on to various prehistoric eras in pursuit of George, Harold and the Captain. It’s all pretty much an excuse for many butt jokes, dashes of off-color humor (“Tippy pressed the button on his Freezy-Beam 4000, causing it to rise from the depths of his Robo-Pants”), a lengthy wordless comic and two tussles in “Flip-o-rama.” Still, the chase kicks off an ice age, the extinction of the dinosaurs and the Big Bang (here the Big “Ka-Bloosh!”). It ends with a harrowing glimpse of what George and Harold would become if they decided to go straight. The author also chucks in a poopy-doo-doo song with musical notation (credited to Albert P. Einstein) and plenty of ink-and-wash cartoon illustrations to crank up the ongoing frenzy.
Series fans, at least, will take this outing (and clear evidence of more to come) in stride. (Fantasy. 10-12)Pub Date: Jan. 15, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-545-17536-4
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Scholastic
Review Posted Online: Dec. 13, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2013
Categories: CHILDREN'S ACTION & ADVENTURE FICTION
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At a time when death has become an acceptable, even voguish subject in children's fiction, Natalie Babbitt comes through with a stylistic gem about living forever.
Protected Winnie, the ten-year-old heroine, is not immortal, but when she comes upon young Jesse Tuck drinking from a secret spring in her parents' woods, she finds herself involved with a family who, having innocently drunk the same water some 87 years earlier, haven't aged a moment since. Though the mood is delicate, there is no lack of action, with the Tucks (previously suspected of witchcraft) now pursued for kidnapping Winnie; Mae Tuck, the middle aged mother, striking and killing a stranger who is onto their secret and would sell the water; and Winnie taking Mae's place in prison so that the Tucks can get away before she is hanged from the neck until....? Though Babbitt makes the family a sad one, most of their reasons for discontent are circumstantial and there isn't a great deal of wisdom to be gleaned from their fate or Winnie's decision not to share it.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1975
ISBN: 0312369816
Page Count: 164
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: April 13, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1975
Categories: CHILDREN'S SCIENCE FICTION & FANTASY | CHILDREN'S SOCIAL THEMES
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