This series continues to be disturbing and brilliant in equal measure.
In the second installment of The Teddies Saga, the bears resume their quest, this time to find their manufacturing origins.
Picking up months after the first book, Buddy and his teddy friends have been living a stable, if not idyllic, life, mostly hidden under Darling’s bed. When the girl’s mother discovers them and becomes outraged, the teddies set out on another journey. Still yearning for the love of a child and encouraged by a final Proto story, they decide to find the Suit and his factory and demand that he fix them. Faced yet again with death and other dark challenges, the remaining bears end up among a village of discarded teddies. While younger readers may not grasp the ambitious nods to The Giver and Paradise Lost, it’s easy to understand the terror the teddies face in this dystopian camp with strange rules and loss of identity. Lending to the horror are loosely drawn scenes in grayscale. Like many middle novels in a trilogy, the worldbuilding is lengthy and slows the narration, yet it gives Buddy more opportunities to explore his leadership, question the ways of the world, and ponder why Furringtons seem to be so reviled. Another cliffhanger ending evokes mysteries to be solved in the next volume.
This series continues to be disturbing and brilliant in equal measure. (Fantasy. 9-12)Pub Date: Sept. 14, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-250-22442-2
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: July 26, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Entrancing and uplifting.
A small dog, the elderly woman who owns him, and a homeless girl come together to create a tale of serendipity.
Piper, almost 12, her parents, and her younger brother are at the bottom of a long slide toward homelessness. Finally in a family shelter, Piper finds that her newfound safety gives her the opportunity to reach out to someone who needs help even more. Jewel, mentally ill, lives in the park with her dog, Baby. Unwilling to leave her pet, and forbidden to enter the shelter with him, she struggles with the winter weather. Ree, also homeless and with a large dog, helps when she can, but after Jewel gets sick and is hospitalized, Baby’s taken to the animal shelter, and Ree can’t manage the complex issues alone. It’s Piper, using her best investigative skills, who figures out Jewel’s backstory. Still, she needs all the help of the shelter Firefly Girls troop that she joins to achieve her accomplishment: to raise enough money to provide Jewel and Baby with a secure, hopeful future and, maybe, with their kindness, to inspire a happier story for Ree. Told in the authentic alternating voices of loving child and loyal dog, this tale could easily slump into a syrupy melodrama, but Pyron lets her well-drawn characters earn their believable happy ending, step by challenging step, by reaching out and working together. Piper, her family, and Jewel present white; Pyron uses hair and naming convention, respectively, to cue Ree as black and Piper’s friend Gabriela as Latinx.
Entrancing and uplifting. (Fiction. 9-12)Pub Date: Aug. 13, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-06-283922-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Katherine Tegen/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: April 9, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2019
Thrills galore for gamers willing to go along for the ride.
A new virtual-reality theme park goes haywire on a crowd of young victims, er, visitors in Alexander’s latest screamfest.
Having scored one of just 100 coveted preview tickets to a cutting-edge, kids-only venue dubbed ESCAPE, budding amusement park fan and designer Cody Baxter is looking forward to a life-changing experience. What he gets is more of a life-threatening one, as games and rides with names like Triassic Terror and Haunted Hillside not only pit him against a monster and then zombies—or sometimes a monster and zombies—as well as ruthless competing players, but seem tailored to play on individual personal terrors. And, in some never explained way, the VR quickly turns into real battles that inflict real wounds even as the real settings shift with sudden, dizzying unpredictability. Teaming up with loyal new friends Jayson Torn and Inga Andersdottir, the former described as being Japanese and White and the latter as Norwegian, Cody (who seems to default to White) struggles for survival, learning ultimately that ESCAPE was created by an evil genius with an ulterior motive who is convinced that he can teach children a salutary lesson. The plot’s no more logical in its twists and contrivances than the premise, but the author’s knack for spinning out nightmarish situations is definitely on display here as the tale careens toward a properly lurid outcome.
Thrills galore for gamers willing to go along for the ride. (Light horror. 9-12)Pub Date: June 7, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-338-26047-2
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Scholastic
Review Posted Online: March 15, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2022
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