Like the increasingly quarrelsome McDonalds, readers will be feeling travel fatigue long before the author’s concluding...
Teen brainiacs Coke and Pepsi McDonald’s cross-country jaunt runs out of gas on its third leg, despite continued silly predicaments and threats of sudden death.
Giving up even a pretense of plausibility, Gutman introduces a new nemesis, masked impersonator Evil Elvis. He joins the bad guys collected in previous episodes for prepared ambushes as the twins and their clueless parents explore a string of tourist destinations—real ones, with photos and Google Maps directions provided. Opening with a teaser for a predicament that doesn’t happen for over 200 pages and isn’t the climax, the author shepherds the McDonald RV from July 4th fireworks on the National Mall to similarly spectacular but more destructive ones at Graceland. They stop along the way at places like the National Jousting Hall of Fame (Mount Solon, Va.), South Carolina’s cheesy, Mexican-themed South of the Border tourist trap, and, inevitably, the Coca-Cola and Pepsi museums (Atlanta and New Bern, N.C., respectively). Imbedded in near-constant infodumps about these and many more roadside attractions that are mentioned but skipped, the various coded messages, captures, rescues and narrow escapes become predictable and repetitive.
Like the increasingly quarrelsome McDonalds, readers will be feeling travel fatigue long before the author’s concluding teaser for Book 4. (Adventure. 10-12)Pub Date: Jan. 22, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-06-182770-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Oct. 9, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Middle-grade fans of L.L. Samson’s Enchanted Attic series will enjoy this, though it’s less clever in its twists and...
Two twins so nearly interchangeable that they even share each other’s thoughts nearly fall victim to a mad scientist in this mildly farcical series kickoff.
Despite genius-level intellects, the young Poes little suspect that their every move has been surreptitiously recorded since birth by crazed nuclear physicist S. Pangborn Perry. Convinced that they are living embodiments of quantum entanglement, he intends to kill one and enslave the other to open a channel of communication with the afterlife. McAlpine first establishes the twins’ bona fides as pranksters by having them turn their Baltimore basement into a chamber of horrors to cow a gang of bullies. He then sends them on a road trip to a supposed Oz-themed amusement park in Kansas, where Perry lurks with their kidnapped cat, Roderick Usher. Along the way, the lads cotton on to the fact that nefarious doings are afoot thanks to garbled warnings from their ancestral namesake, who watches over them from the not-quite-Heavenly office that generates fortune-cookie fortunes. In a climax filled with flying stage monkeys and falling counterweights, they scotch Perry’s plot—at least for this episode. Occasional letters, journal entries and text messages, as well as small, scribbly ink sketches fill out and add visual breaks to the narrative.
Middle-grade fans of L.L. Samson’s Enchanted Attic series will enjoy this, though it’s less clever in its twists and literary references. (Adventure. 10-12)Pub Date: Jan. 10, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-670-78491-2
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Nov. 13, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2012
Unsurprisingly, Jinx displays hints of developing powers beyond the ordinary. Astonishingly, he and his world still seem...
Making unusually entertaining use of well-worn elements, this series opener plops a dense but promising young wizard-in-training between a pair of obnoxious rival mages.
Left by his stepparents to die in the dangerous Urwald, Jinx is rescued by Simon Magus, a “possibly evil” forest-dwelling wizard whose obsession with magical research is matched only by a truly profound lack of people skills. Several years later, having learned a little magic but also injured by one of Simon’s spells, Jinx stomps off in a rage to seek help. But hardly has he fallen in with a couple of ensorcelled fellow travelers, than all three fall into the clutches of the genial but rightly feared Bonemaster. Along with setting this adventuresome outing in a sentient forest populated by trolls, werewolves and giddy witches who bound about in butter churns, the pseudonymous Blackwood spins out lively dialogue threaded with comical rudeness and teasing. Trotting out a supporting cast whose inner characters are often at thought-provoking odds with their outer seeming, she also puts her central three through a string of suspenseful, scary situations before delivering a properly balanced closing set of resolutions, revelations and road signs to future episodes.
Unsurprisingly, Jinx displays hints of developing powers beyond the ordinary. Astonishingly, he and his world still seem fresh, for all that they echo familiar tropes. (Fantasy. 10-12)Pub Date: Jan. 8, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-06-212990-1
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Oct. 9, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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