Deft stimulus for both brains and funny bones.
Sawyer Bronson’s spiky stegosaurus tail provides both help and hindrance in a rescue flight to the red planet that takes on solar system–wide significance.
As in Dinosaur Boy (2015), Oakes lays a plotline stocked with daft twists atop a foundation of big, serious themes. Thanks to some bad history and simmering racial tensions, the upcoming soccer game between Mars’ Red Razers and the blue-skinned Kuiper Kickers of Pluto is shaping up to be a grudge match, with Pluto’s iffy status as an official planet and its very membership in the Intergalactic Soccer Federation at stake. But even before Bronson arrives on Mars in his grandpa’s flying saucer there are hints that the fix is in—with the Martian Council set to vote the dwarf planet out whatever the final score and a radical Plutonian splinter group dubbed the Brotherhood United for the Restoration of Planetary Status (which yields the delightful acronym BURPSers) plotting to release an experimental bioweapon. Can Bronson find a way to scotch both schemes? Around these plainly metaphorical elements the author weaves subplots including divorce, friendship, polar bear extinction, and the power of classic TV to promote interplanetary harmony. She also again sets up her white, fifth-grade protagonist to display a thoroughly admirable willingness to make peace by shouldering responsibilities that others will not.
Deft stimulus for both brains and funny bones. (appendix of scientific references) (Science fiction. 10-12)Pub Date: Feb. 2, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4926-0540-9
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Sourcebooks Jabberwocky
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Mild chills in either language.
“La Llorona” and other traditional bugaboos from Mexican-American lore find modern young victims in this bilingual set of South Texas tales.
That ghostly mother seeking replacements for her dead children succeeds in two of Sandaña’s six offerings. The others are rather less eerie. Shy Joey fails to prevent his intended date, Marlen, from fatally “Dancing with the Devil,” and Cecelia comes to accept that “God’s Will Be Done” after a mysterious bull prevents her from meeting a suave stranger in defiance of parental orders. The other stories take almost comically grisly turns, with a mother’s warnings about the consequences of playing with knives coming literally true as “Louie Spills His Guts” through a small cut in his toe. Another lad is nearly “All Choked Up” in an ER waiting room by a severed hand that arrives in an ice chest. The original English versions occupy the first half of the volume, and their Spanish translations the second half.
Mild chills in either language. (Short stories. 10-12)Pub Date: April 30, 2012
ISBN: 979-1-55885-744-5
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Piñata Books/Arte Público
Review Posted Online: March 27, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2012
Pure, Goosebumps–style terror-by-formula, polished through use to such a high gloss that it slides along frictionlessly—a...
Making its fourth appearance and by now practically a recurring character in Stine’s creep-show opus, the evil mask with a mind of its own kicks off a new Goosebumps spinoff—the first to be originally published in hardcover.
Stine crafts two Halloween chillers and links them at the end. In the first, after an introductory setup set 40 years in the past, Lu-Ann wanders away from a friend’s boring party and discovers a demonic green mask in an old trunk. It not only doesn’t come off once she dons it (natch), but enflames her with uncontrollable and destructive anger issues. In the second, Lu-Ann’s friend Devin’s conviction that his holiday is going to be lame since he has to spend it helping his family sell pick-your-own pumpkins doesn’t last long. The vines start moving, the pumpkins turn squishy when he touches them, and the dead begin to rise from the graveyard beneath the field. Featuring plenty of sudden screams, eerie dreams, creeping dread and spooky undead (but no actual bloodshed), the plotlines ultimately intertwine in a climax that frees both young teens from their travails and allows them (and readers) to laugh at it all the next morning.
Pure, Goosebumps–style terror-by-formula, polished through use to such a high gloss that it slides along frictionlessly—a worthy celebration of the series’ 20th anniversary. (reversible dust-jacket mask [not seen]) (Horror. 10-12)Pub Date: July 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-545-41793-8
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Scholastic
Review Posted Online: April 24, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2012
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