Lots of weird appeal.
A boy and his new friends fight back against a creepy conspiracy.
Twelve-year-old Reggie Wong is angry all the time. His dad is dead, his paranoid mom won’t leave the apartment, and he gets picked on a lot by a classmate. When a strange man tells him that he can have his greatest wish, Reggie, who is cued as Chinese Canadian, jumps on the chance despite possessing a healthy amount of skepticism. He and hordes of other Toronto children (including Chantal, a precocious, brown-skinned Quebecois girl who peppers her speech with French, and his nemesis Gareth, a White boy who turns out to be more sensitive than Reggie had expected) are lured underground on a train by the Conductor. They get to interact with robot versions of their lost loved ones, while on the surface, they are replaced by humanoid rats. The three youths come up with a plan to fight back against this twisted Pied Piper, and in doing so, they find themselves. The story itself is interesting, fast-paced, and full of middle-grade–appropriate horror, both supernatural and familiar. The prose gets distracting, however, with its many jarring flourishes—the Conductor’s grating speech is overwhelmingly punctuated with words like ratty-tatties, nummy-nibblies, splickity-lickity, and gumbledy-green—and never quite hits either an authentically youthful voice or an atmospherically unsettling description of the events, but most young readers will look past these faults and focus on the adventure.
Lots of weird appeal. (Horror. 8-12)Pub Date: July 26, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-368-07763-7
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Disney-Hyperion
Review Posted Online: April 26, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2022
The three way chats, in which they are joined by other animals, about web spinning, themselves, other humans—are as often...
A successful juvenile by the beloved New Yorker writer portrays a farm episode with an imaginative twist that makes a poignant, humorous story of a pig, a spider and a little girl.
Young Fern Arable pleads for the life of runt piglet Wilbur and gets her father to sell him to a neighbor, Mr. Zuckerman. Daily, Fern visits the Zuckermans to sit and muse with Wilbur and with the clever pen spider Charlotte, who befriends him when he is lonely and downcast. At the news of Wilbur's forthcoming slaughter, campaigning Charlotte, to the astonishment of people for miles around, spins words in her web. "Some Pig" comes first. Then "Terrific"—then "Radiant". The last word, when Wilbur is about to win a show prize and Charlotte is about to die from building her egg sac, is "Humble". And as the wonderful Charlotte does die, the sadness is tempered by the promise of more spiders next spring.
The three way chats, in which they are joined by other animals, about web spinning, themselves, other humans—are as often informative as amusing, and the whole tenor of appealing wit and pathos will make fine entertainment for reading aloud, too.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 1952
ISBN: 978-0-06-026385-0
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1952
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
However the compelling fitness of theme and event and the apt but unexpected imagery (the opening sentences compare the...
At a time when death has become an acceptable, even voguish subject in children's fiction, Natalie Babbitt comes through with a stylistic gem about living forever.
Protected Winnie, the ten-year-old heroine, is not immortal, but when she comes upon young Jesse Tuck drinking from a secret spring in her parents' woods, she finds herself involved with a family who, having innocently drunk the same water some 87 years earlier, haven't aged a moment since. Though the mood is delicate, there is no lack of action, with the Tucks (previously suspected of witchcraft) now pursued for kidnapping Winnie; Mae Tuck, the middle aged mother, striking and killing a stranger who is onto their secret and would sell the water; and Winnie taking Mae's place in prison so that the Tucks can get away before she is hanged from the neck until....? Though Babbitt makes the family a sad one, most of their reasons for discontent are circumstantial and there isn't a great deal of wisdom to be gleaned from their fate or Winnie's decision not to share it.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1975
ISBN: 0312369816
Page Count: 164
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: April 13, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1975
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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