A mixed bag: Fights and reveals are lackluster, but the stars and steampunk glow.
Stars are falling, and the people who usually send them back up aren’t able.
Kyro’s father, Tirin, works as a Star Shepherd. He watches the skies all night. When a star falls to Earth nearby, Kyro and Tirin run outdoors, scoop it up, and catapult it back to the sky before dawn. Each star is different: One’s a “strange, molten thing, with light leaking out over its curves”; another “shimmer[s] like liquid silver but [i]s as light as a handful of feathers.” But something’s wrong: Stars are falling in daylight and in clusters, the gaps they leave in the dark sky allowing ancient, evil creatures into the world. When Tirin disappears, Kyro, with pal Andra (a girl who’s more supportiveness trope than person), embarks on a desperate journey to find his father. The plot begins as a wondrous celestial fable with some steampunk elements—cogs and gears; clockwork; star cases of “glass and metal with hooks built into the design and angled just right to catch on the edges of the sky.” But it morphs surprisingly and disappointingly into a story of combat featuring sentient, mechanical giants and fire-breathing spiders with slimy black webbing. The final battle slogs, and the plot’s reveals are reported listlessly. However, the star premise shines throughout. Kyro, Tirin, and Andra seem white or light-skinned.
A mixed bag: Fights and reveals are lackluster, but the stars and steampunk glow. (map) (Fantasy. 8-12)Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-4926-5820-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Sourcebooks
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2019
An enthralling fantasy debut exploring exploitation by those in power.
Will 12-year-old Nura be able to outsmart the trickster jinn and save herself and her friends?
Nura lives in the fictional Pakistani town of Meerabagh, where she has worked mining mica to help support her family of five—her mother, herself, and her three younger siblings—since her father’s death. In the mines she has the company of her best friend, Faisal, who is teased by other kids for his stutter, and she enjoys small pleasures like splurging on gulab jamun. Although Maa wants Nura to stop working and attend school, she has no interest in classroom learning and hopes to save up to send her younger siblings to school instead so they can break the family’s cycle of poverty. Following a mining accident in which Faisal and others are lost in the rubble, Nura goes to the rescue. In her quest, she is plunged into the magical, glittering jinn realm, where nothing is as it seems. The author seamlessly weaves into the worldbuilding of the story commentary on real-life problems such as the ravages of child labor and systems that perpetuate inequities. An informative author’s note further explores present-day global cycles of oppression as well as the life-changing power of education. This action-packed story set in a Muslim community moves at a fast pace, with evocative writing that brings the fantasy world to life and lyrical imagery to describe emotions.
An enthralling fantasy debut exploring exploitation by those in power. (Fantasy. 8-12)Pub Date: July 5, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-7595-5795-6
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Jimmy Patterson/Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: April 26, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2022
A vibrant celebration of art’s power to console and heal.
Zora, 12, shares her mother’s artistic gifts, but when grief and guilt lead her to destroy years of drawings, the results are astonishing.
Voom is Zora and her mom’s word for the artistic impulse that bubbles up inside. After disclosing her leukemia diagnosis to Zora and her sister, Frankie, Mom promised the girls she’d beat it. Ten months later, their far sicker mom is hospitalized in Pittsburgh, where the girls share their bus driver grandmother’s basement apartment. Mom continues to be optimistic and avoid acknowledging the possibility of death. Frustrated and needing to hear a realistic prognosis, Zora uses her art to show her mother the truth of how ill she looks. Later that night her mom dies—and Zora’s Voom goes away. When Grandma Wren disappoints Frankie on her seventh birthday, Zora’s guilt-fueled anger erupts. Over Frankie’s protests, Zora scribbles out her drawings until the scribbles fight back, pulling the girls into Pencilvania, a world where each of Zora’s creations lives. Most of her now-animated drawings welcome her—except for one scribbled-out horse who kidnaps Frankie. Guided by a seven-legged horse, the Zoracle (a composite of her early self-portraits), and other charming creations, Zora sets out to rescue Frankie and rediscover the wellspring of creativity that forms her mother’s legacy. Presumed White, the humans are well rounded and believable. Pencilvania’s inhabitants, conceived with humorous, metafictional whimsy, are enlivened with copious, inventive illustrations.
A vibrant celebration of art’s power to console and heal. (Fiction. 8-12)Pub Date: Oct. 5, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-72821-590-7
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Sourcebooks Young Readers
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2021
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