A clever series opener that draws from the myths and pantheons of numerous ancient cultures.
This debut middle-grade adventure sees a group of kids train to prevent an alien invasion of Earth.
One night, the diminutive, pointy-eared Carl Bellon pops up from a seemingly unspectacular hole in an empty lot. He teams up with a German shepherd named Mercure to visit the home of 13-year-old Alex Vega. The dog telepathically alerts the teen’s family members, including Alex’s parents, Miguel and Janet, and sister, Aura, to imminent danger. They escape as four green spheres float toward the house and set it ablaze. While running to the hole in the lot, Miguel and Janet use a polished black tablet called a Z-Con (or Zero Point Field Condenser) to defend against the spheres. The hole, it turns out, is a portal that leads to a carved-out facility inside the Himalayan Mountains. There, Alex learns of the Praefectus, who possess advanced alien technology and have been training for generations to defend Earth against intergalactic invaders. He also meets more children—Maia, Elka, and Dion—with whom he’ll train, and the Masters Kattan and Ebo. The Masters guide the young apprentices through various portals to their new home at the Jade pyramid, a section of the Earth Defense Operations School. In this novel, D.J. Burchell and M.A. Burchell combine touches of the Harry Potter and Indiana Jones series to introduce an epic saga that includes the origins of gods like Zeus and Ra. The brother-and-sister team maintains a tight narrative flow, unveiling the wonders of the Z-Con technology through the kids’ eyes. Less savvy authors might infodump story elements, but the Burchells refuse. Mercure says to Alex, “Some things you should discover for yourself. More exciting that way, isn’t it?” Indeed, ice cream that tastes like a high dive into the ocean and Gravity-Energy Manipulator suits that confer near invincibility are wondrously detailed. With Z-Cons standing in for wands, the children solve a minimystery while learning to fly planes and sail, skills potentially needed for later missions. The authors lay down an exceptional foundation of characters and worldbuilding for more dangerous escapades to come.
A clever series opener that draws from the myths and pantheons of numerous ancient cultures.Pub Date: Aug. 26, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-941952-10-8
Page Count: 370
Publisher: South Bay Publishing
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Britisher Swift's sixth novel (Ever After, 1992 etc.) and fourth to appear here is a slow-to-start but then captivating tale of English working-class families in the four decades following WW II. When Jack Dodds dies suddenly of cancer after years of running a butcher shop in London, he leaves a strange request—namely, that his ashes be scattered off Margate pier into the sea. And who could better be suited to fulfill this wish than his three oldest drinking buddies—insurance man Ray, vegetable seller Lenny, and undertaker Vic, all of whom, like Jack himself, fought also as soldiers or sailors in the long-ago world war. Swift's narrative start, with its potential for the melodramatic, is developed instead with an economy, heart, and eye that release (through the characters' own voices, one after another) the story's humanity and depth instead of its schmaltz. The jokes may be weak and self- conscious when the three old friends meet at their local pub in the company of the urn holding Jack's ashes; but once the group gets on the road, in an expensive car driven by Jack's adoptive son, Vince, the story starts gradually to move forward, cohere, and deepen. The reader learns in time why it is that no wife comes along, why three marriages out of three broke apart, and why Vince always hated his stepfather Jack and still does—or so he thinks. There will be stories of innocent youth, suffering wives, early loves, lost daughters, secret affairs, and old antagonisms—including a fistfight over the dead on an English hilltop, and a strewing of Jack's ashes into roiling seawaves that will draw up feelings perhaps unexpectedly strong. Without affectation, Swift listens closely to the lives that are his subject and creates a songbook of voices part lyric, part epic, part working-class social realism—with, in all, the ring to it of the honest, human, and true.
Pub Date: April 5, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-41224-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1996
Not as thematically ambitious as Whitehead’s earlier work, but a whole lot of fun to read.
Another surprise from an author who never writes the same novel twice.
Though Whitehead has earned considerable critical acclaim for his earlier work—in particular his debut (The Intuitionist, 1999) and its successor (John Henry Days, 2001)—he’ll likely reach a wider readership with his warmest novel to date. Funniest as well, though there have been flashes of humor throughout his writing. The author blurs the line between fiction and memoir as he recounts the coming-of-age summer of 15-year-old Benji Cooper in the family’s summer retreat of New York’s Sag Harbor. “According to the world, we were the definition of paradox: black boys with beach houses,” writes Whitehead. Caucasians are only an occasional curiosity within this idyll, and parents are mostly absent as well. Each chapter is pretty much a self-contained entity, corresponding to a rite of passage: getting the first job, negotiating the mysteries of the opposite sex. There’s an accident with a BB gun and plenty of episodes of convincing someone older to buy beer, but not much really happens during this particular summer. Yet by the end of it, Benji is well on his way to becoming Ben, and he realizes that he is a different person than when the summer started. He also realizes that this time in his life will eventually live only in memory. There might be some distinctions between Benji and Whitehead, though the novelist also spent his youthful summers in Sag Harbor and was the same age as Benji in 1985, when the novel is set. Yet the first-person narrator has the novelist’s eye for detail, craft of character development and analytical instincts for sharp social commentary.
Not as thematically ambitious as Whitehead’s earlier work, but a whole lot of fun to read.Pub Date: April 28, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-385-52765-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2009
BOOK TO SCREEN
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