A cleverly conceived exploration of fear and abandonment rendered less effective by dreamlike dissociation.
A young boy finds himself trapped inside a painting in this middle-grade adventure from Masters.
Mason lives with his mother. When school’s out, he usually plays outside with his friends, but this summer, those friends are all at camp. The lonely Mason wishes desperately for something exciting to happen. When his mum comes home from work, she offers to take him to the museum. They used to go quite often when Mason was younger, and though he feels he’s outgrown it, the boy agrees to go along. While Mason stares at Maria’s Summer Day, the girl in the painting starts moving. She even talks to him! Before he knows it, he’s agreed to change places with her for a minute so she can experience the outside world. But when the girl doesn’t come back straightaway, Mason panics. He beats his fists on the inside of the painting, knocking it from the wall. Mason becomes lost in a Stygian netherworld, travelling among paintings and pursued by a green-eyed monster. Will he ever find his way free? Masters’ flat prose and dialogue, written in the third-person past tense (“Mason passed the hours by drawing, watching TV, or tossing a ball into the air in the backyard. Late into the afternoon, from the backyard Mason heard the front door open and close again”), makes the story easy to read but not especially engaging. Mason undergoes a nightmarish experience but there is little sense of causality and insufficient detail to animate his travails. As such, his bewilderment is observed rather than felt, and readers will miss out on the full chill of being lost between paintings. Mason himself, though—like the paintings when observed from the outside—is given only a cursory characterization. The concept itself is quite thrilling, and Masters taps into a rich vein of imagination.
A cleverly conceived exploration of fear and abandonment rendered less effective by dreamlike dissociation.Pub Date: Dec. 10, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-73536-384-4
Page Count: 92
Publisher: Masters Publishing LLC
Review Posted Online: Nov. 29, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Extraordinary introductory terror, beautiful to the eye and sure to delight younger horror enthusiasts.
What terrors lurk within your mouth? Jasper Rabbit knows.
“You have stumbled your way into the unknown.” The young bunny introduced in Reynolds and Brown’s Caldecott Honor–winning picture book, Creepy Carrots (2012), takes up Rod Serling’s mantle, and the fit is perfect. Mimicking an episode of The Twilight Zone, the book follows Charlie Marmot, an average kid with a penchant for the strange and unusual. He’s pleased when his tonsils become infected; maybe once they’re out he can take them to school for show and tell! That’s when bizarre things start to happen: Noises in the night. Slimy trails on his bedroom floor. And when Charlie goes in for his surgery, he’s told that the tonsils have disappeared from his throat; clearly something sinister is afoot. Those not yet ready for Goosebumps levels of horror will find this a welcome starter pack. Reynolds has perfected the tension he employed in his Creepy Tales! series, and partner in crime Brown imbues each illustration with both humor and a delicate undercurrent of dark foreshadowing. While the fleshy pink tonsils—the sole spot of color in this black-and-white world—aren’t outrageously gross, there’s something distinctly disgusting about them. And though the book stars cute, furry woodland creatures, the spooky surprise ending is 100% otherworldly—a marvelous moment of twisted logic.
Extraordinary introductory terror, beautiful to the eye and sure to delight younger horror enthusiasts. (Early chapter book. 6-9)Pub Date: Sept. 2, 2025
ISBN: 9781665961080
Page Count: 88
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 30, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2025
PERSPECTIVES
We challenge anyone to read this and keep a straight face.
Four misunderstood villains endeavor to turn over a new leaf…or a new rap sheet in Blabey's frenzied romp.
As readers open the first page of this early chapter book, Mr. Wolf is right there to greet them, bemoaning his reputation. "Just because I've got BIG POINTY TEETH and RAZOR-SHARP CLAWS and I occasionally like to dress up like an OLD LADY, that doesn't mean… / … I'm a BAD GUY." To prove this very fact, Mr. Wolf enlists three equally slandered friends into the Good Guys Club: Mr. Snake (aka the Chicken Swallower), Mr. Piranha (aka the Butt Biter), and Mr. Shark (aka Jaws). After some convincing from Mr. Wolf, the foursome sets off determined to un-smirch their names (and reluctantly curbing their appetites). Although these predators find that not everyone is ready to be at the receiving end of their helpful efforts, they use all their Bad Guy know-how to manage a few hilarious good deeds. Blabey has hit the proverbial nail on the head, kissed it full on the mouth, and handed it a stick of Acme dynamite. With illustrations that startle in their manic comedy and deadpan direct address and with a narrative that follows four endearingly sardonic characters trying to push past (sometimes successfully) their fear-causing natures, this book instantly joins the classic ranks of Captain Underpants and The Stinky Cheese Man.
We challenge anyone to read this and keep a straight face. (Fiction. 7-11)Pub Date: Jan. 3, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-545-91240-2
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Scholastic
Review Posted Online: Sept. 18, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2016
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