A quest fantasy that moves further into mediocrity despite plenty of borrowed notions and tropes.
Vega Jane and her cohorts at last find the home base of the evil wizards who have conquered the world—and discover that rebellion carries a high price.
Having escaped the town of Wormwood and the spell-protected wilderness around it in search of her family, newly fledged sorceress Vega Jane now confronts the Maladons—malign magicians who have ruled everywhere else for eight centuries over a populace brainwashed into mindless contentment. Working from a mansion that the head Maladon visited in olden times but is now somehow hidden (internal consistency is not a priority here), Vega Jane recruits and trains a small army of magicians to fight back while effecting rescues and eluding multiple ambushes with help from a ring of invisibility and spells that involve pointing wands and shouting words such as “Embattlemento” and “Engulfiado” that beg (unfavorable) comparison to J.K. Rowling. Baldacci mixes adolescent snogging, animate housewares, another talking book (see Volume 2, The Keeper, 2015), and bad guys uniformly dressed in pinstripe suits and brown bowlers into a tale that also features casual killing, torture, and forked-tongued demons. Throughout, he continues to demonstrate that he doesn’t have Rowling’s knack for mixing sly fun with truly dark doings. Moreover, repeated glimpses of characters with dark or brown (or “walnut”) skin are at best weak efforts to inject diversity into the cast.
A quest fantasy that moves further into mediocrity despite plenty of borrowed notions and tropes. (glossary) (Fantasy. 11-13)Pub Date: Feb. 28, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-545-83196-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Scholastic
Review Posted Online: Dec. 20, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2017
A fitting capstone to an epic adventure replete with monsters, huge explosions, clever twists, and just deserts.
Seven young heroes, together at last and diverse in many ways, tackle armies of monsters as well as a cycle of warfare that has turned for thousands of years.
“League of Seven—full steam ahead!” In this headlong climax, Gratz adds the final two members to his intrepid band of world savers: tattooed, gray-skinned “science-pirate” Martine, whose synesthetic perceptions come in handy more than once; and Gonzalo, a blind young Texas Ranger with a talkative, intelligent raygun dubbed Señor X. Colorful as these and the other League members are, both in the story and in Helquist’s stylish portraits at each chapter’s head, the central figure remains Archie Dent, a superstrong lad snow-white of skin and hair and made from solid rock. Here, as previously, Archie’s internal struggles with rage and guilt parallel a string of awesomely destructive battles he and his allies have with the immortal Mangleborn and part-human Manglespawn led by tentacled archnemesis Philomena Moffett. Following a climactic battle at Gettysburg and a final dust-up with Moffett atop the great statue of Hiawatha in the harbor of New Rome (this is a very alternate, clockwork America), it only remains to expose the secret Septemberist Society, whose suppression of scientific research has misguidedly perpetuated the Mangleborn’s cyclical return down through the centuries.
A fitting capstone to an epic adventure replete with monsters, huge explosions, clever twists, and just deserts. (map) (Steampunk. 11-13)Pub Date: July 12, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-7653-3824-2
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Starscape/Tom Doherty
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
The book closes with drama enough for a sequel; action-happy readers will be hoping for it
A steampunk thriller uses Victorian science as a framework for cinematic monster goofiness in 1838 London.
It's been six months since 15-year-old Julius Caesar Higgins' last time-travel adventure (Julius and the Watchmaker, 2014), but it seems he has to save the world yet again. Together with his guttersnipe BFF, Emily, Julius has to defeat a passel of villains perfect for animation: tiny, odd-faced Mr. Tock; a pair of comical-but-dangerous thugs, one short and solid, the other tall and "thin as a workhouse dog" with a face "like a stalactite"; Abigail, the murderous automaton made of forks and knives and pocket watches, like a 10-foot praying mantis crossed with a spider; and countless ambulatory, zombifying, soul-catching orchids that pull themselves from their pots and chase their victims. In a twist, they travel through time and temporarily look like “native” children in a village in Brazil, “gone all brown.” (The characters otherwise all appear to be white; Emily speaks in exaggerated, spelled-out lower-class English: "Frough wot?"; "I wasn't planning on nicking naffing.") There they visit Charles Darwin, who in history at this point was visiting local botanical gardens and documenting insects but who here is ineffectually rescuing nonverbal native children from the soul-catchers, which leave their hosts planted husks, like some sort of Anne Geddes or Giuseppe Arcimboldo portrait gone horrifically wrong. Julius’ self-talk, printed in italics, peppers the text: “Concentrate, Higgins.”
The book closes with drama enough for a sequel; action-happy readers will be hoping for it . (Steampunk. 11-13)Pub Date: Aug. 9, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-925240-17-7
Page Count: 337
Publisher: Text
Review Posted Online: June 27, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2016
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