To be devoured with relish—though maybe not broccoli.
The Weenie-Meister’s sixth collection offers 32 more macabre minitales.
He puts the Gorgon back into “Gorgonzola,” pauses for a rousing night of vampire “Catfishing in America” and redefines “Smart Food” through an encounter with talking broccoli, among other ventures. Throughout, Lubar continues to produce short-shorts expertly spun around figures of speech, tweaked story titles and disquieting twists of fate. Pandering particularly to readers with a taste for icky treats, he trots in a protean alien who sets itself up as a sideshow self-mutilator, a bully tricked into blasting out his own cheeks and a smile-obsessed child who melts his teeth away by overusing whitening strips—among other hapless victims of bad behavior, predatory monsters or plain bad luck. The tales' extreme brevity—the longest tops out at a whopping 10 pages—makes them especially well suited to reading aloud.
To be devoured with relish—though maybe not broccoli. (end notes) (Short short stories. 10-12)Pub Date: June 5, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-7653-3213-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Starscape/Tom Doherty
Review Posted Online: March 13, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A deft mix of chills and chuckles, not quite as sideways as Wayside School but in the same district.
A fifth-grader struggles to fit in after he and his recently widowed mother move to a decidedly oddball new town.
As if the seemingly infinite pier, the lighthouse in the middle of town, and the beach teeming with enigmatic cats aren’t strange enough, Davy Jones discovers that his school locker has been relocated to the deep end of the swimming pool, his lunchtime fries are delivered by a “spudzooka,” and no one seems to be able to get his name right. On the other hand, his classmates welcome him, and in next to no time he’s breaking into an abandoned arcade to play pinball against a ghost, helping track down a pet pig gone missing on Gravity Maintenance Day, and like adventures that, often as not, take sinister swerves before edging back to the merely peculiar. Point-of-view duties pass freely from character to character, and chapters are punctuated with extracts from the Topsea School Gazette (“Today’s Seaweed Level: Medium-high and feisty”), bulletins on such topics as the safe handling of rubber ducks, and background notes on, for instance, the five local seasons, giving the narrative a pleasantly loose-jointed feel. Davy presents as white, but several other central cast members are specifically described as dark- or light-skinned and are so depicted in the frequent line drawings; one has two moms.
A deft mix of chills and chuckles, not quite as sideways as Wayside School but in the same district. (Fantasy. 10-12)Pub Date: April 17, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-368-00005-5
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Disney-Hyperion
Review Posted Online: Feb. 18, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2018
Readers are better off with the original because, as the British would say, this rendition is too clever by half.
A literal bird’s-eye recounting of the Greek tragedy Antigone in the current era of kids and teens, such as Naomi Wadler and the Parkland High School shooting survivor-activists, leading the movements to speak truth to power.
Scottish author Smith (Winter, 2018, etc.) relates the classic play through the admittedly clever viewpoint of a carrion crow. The nameless bird, gendered as “she,” watches 12-year-old Antigone and her “maybe a little older,” though not age-specified, sister, Ismene, as the former defies the new king—and their uncle—Creon, who forbids anyone to administer funeral rites to Polynices, whom the king declares a traitor and who is Antigone and Ismene’s brother, on point of death. Of course, anyone familiar with Sophocles’ legendary drama knows Antigone’s deadly decision to honor her brother and the unheeded counsel Creon receives about punishing her choice that leads to the tragedy’s devastating conclusion. This beat-for-beat update does not change that plot. Though the illustrations’ muted pink and gray tones give a somberly ethereal quality, the author’s use of the bird as a narrative device distances readers from the characters’ very human decisions and their heartbreaking consequences—the very antithesis of tragedy’s purpose. This is one of three revisited classics released simultaneously; the others are The Story of Captain Nemo, by Dave Eggers and illustrated by Fabian Negrin, and The Story of Gulliver, by Jonathan Cho and illustrated by Sarah Oddi.
Readers are better off with the original because, as the British would say, this rendition is too clever by half. (Fiction. 10-12)Pub Date: March 26, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-78269-089-4
Page Count: 100
Publisher: Pushkin Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 14, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2019
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
