Confused readers will wish that the author had spent a lot more time fitting together the random and extraneous elements...
From the author of Attack of the Frozen Woodchucks (2008) comes an equally surreal cyber-caper loosely attached to an incoherent story line.
At 11 3/4, Daphna is already a talented composer, whose music transports listeners into refreshing trances—so she fits right in with the rest of her genius New York schoolmates. Harkin “Thunk” Thunkenreiser is developing a chewing-gum computer that puts the chewer online as long as the flavor lasts, and her friend Cynthia is recasting Macbeth as a one-woman musical while starring in a string of smash Broadway hits. Two months after her mother’s disappearance at sea, ineffectual pursuers wearing antelope masks pursue grieving Daphna and her allies to a hidden valley on Mount Kilimanjaro, where the children find evidence that the school’s great benefactor, digital entrepreneur Ignatius Blatt (think Steve Jobs with the fashion sense of Ronald McDonald) has actually stolen all the wildly popular digital gadgets he claims to have invented himself. Thanks to a spy in Daphna’s circle of friends, Blatt releases contact-lens computers that give him control (through a ring on his finger) over the minds of those who wear them. The shoveled-together climax is of a piece with the rest of this overstuffed, self-conscious tale.
Confused readers will wish that the author had spent a lot more time fitting together the random and extraneous elements here. (Fantasy. 10-12)Pub Date: June 21, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-06-113873-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: April 18, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2011
A plodding sequel showing signs that the series is already running low on inspirational steam.
Having (they think) vanquished one shadowy secret society in their first exploit (The Thief’s Apprentice, 2016), young Oliver and Mr. Scant, his claw-handed valet/mentor, tackle several more in their second.
When the search for Mr. Scant’s missing teenage niece, Elspeth, brings the plucky white protagonists to a China seething under European domination in the wake of the Boxer Rebellion, they are quickly cast into a cauldron of intrigue. This is stirred not only by the previously met Tri-Loom, but also by the equally shadowy Star and Stone Association and the Viridian Clan—one of which has been kidnapping French youths as part of a baroque scheme to assassinate the 5-year-old Xuantong Emperor and so fuel a new effort to throw off the foreign yoke. Ultimately, following a proper round of revelations, betrayals, and desperate heroics, the scheme is scotched. But even though (aside from giving the Chinese a light wash of inscrutability) Methods largely manages to avoid ethnic stereotypes and allows his female characters a modicum of agency to boot, the episode is largely a pastiche of standard-issue elements that bogs down in inconsequential meetings and discussions, general to-ing and fro-ing, and such missed opportunities as a dirigible voyage from Britain to Shanghai that is done in four pages.
A plodding sequel showing signs that the series is already running low on inspirational steam. (Adventure. 10-12)Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5124-0580-4
Page Count: 264
Publisher: Carolrhoda
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
There’s no place like school, “grimy, gargoyle-encrusted walls” and all.
Odd doings at the Maudlin Towers School for the Not Particularly Bright Sons of the Not Especially Wealthy.
First young Arthur Mildew and Algernon Spongely-Partwork spot (to quote the title of Chapter 1) “A Viking in the Ha-Ha.” Shortly thereafter the school’s prized Spoon is stolen (twice), and rumors of an arm-waving ghost give way to the arrival of a beautiful, arm-waving new Latin teacher. The lads decide to do a bit of “detectivating” (Mildew, explaining “red herring” to his dim associate: “Something that seems relevant at first but turns out not to be. Like algebra”)—and hardly have they begun than they come upon a time machine built by former physics instructor Mr. Particle before his recent gruesome death. Decorating his “unfortunate events”–style narrative with gothic ink drawings of the all-white (even corpselike) students, faculty, and occasional slavering monster, Priestley sends his bumbling but resourceful detectivators crisscrossing back and forth from their present to Viking times, Roman Britain, and even into the future (where cookies are shockingly expensive and which readers will find quite familiar). By the end all mysteries are sorted (more or less), and Sponge and Mildew are left gloomily poised for another outing.
There’s no place like school, “grimy, gargoyle-encrusted walls” and all. (Gothic farce. 10-12)Pub Date: July 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-68119-932-0
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: March 26, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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