An engaging story about kids who, through an outlandish animal, learn important lessons about understanding, empathy and...
A brother and sister meet a strange creature that helps them see the world in a new way.
Esme and George are siblings who argue a lot, but a suggestion by their caring grandfather that they go treasure hunting is about to change their relationship. He gives the two a spade and a metal detector, and they set out with their dog to start finding treasure. They haven’t been out long when the ground starts to shake—it’s not an earthquake, as they think. Instead, the two are lifted into the air on the back of a strange, huge animal. It’s the size of a whale and glows like a star, and the siblings nickname it “Skywhale.” Esme is able to telepathically communicate with it, but George, being an older teenager, can’t, so Esme relays details about the species to her brother. Skywhales have had a difficult relationship with humans, she learns, and they live in Iceland, where there’s no military to shoot at them as they fly through the air. Their Skywhale whisks them on a trip through the sky, where they see airplanes flying, meet people looking for UFOs, help a beached whale and soothe him until the tide comes in and he’s washed back out to sea. They also visit a crystal cave in Iceland, where there are hundreds of other skywhales, and make use of their treasure-hunting tools to find an old Viking treasure. But it’s not all harmless: On a visit to London, where they fly by Big Ben, fighter jets are deployed when the skywhale is spotted, and Esme and George are at risk. The story is an engaging one, as both kids are relatable—an older brother who thinks he’s a little bit cooler than his inquisitive younger sister. In the well-written story, Richards has a strong, descriptive style that’s easy to read: “One particular bracelet caught the light….[I]t was made of gold that still shone yellow in the sunlight. Esme picked it up to look at it. The gold had been engraved to make the bangle look like a snake that was swallowing its tail.” Readers will eagerly tag along on this adventurous ride.
An engaging story about kids who, through an outlandish animal, learn important lessons about understanding, empathy and relationships.Pub Date: July 15, 2014
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 83
Publisher: MuseItUp Publishing
Review Posted Online: Oct. 6, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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