An amusing adventure story with a few flaws but great empathy for kids’ feelings.
A boy with problems gains a helpful green dragon friend in this debut middle-grade novel.
Narrator Domingo “Ding” Diaz, 11, of South Los Angeles is finding life difficult lately. He wants to stay away from trouble but a gang is pressuring him to join its ranks; he’s been getting into fights; and his schoolwork has suffered. Far worse than any of this, Ding’s mother died and the boy blames himself. Running heedlessly away from a doctor’s appointment, Ding is hit by a bus—and finds himself in a strange world. He’s been saved from annihilation by a small, raspy-voiced dragon called Green Flash, who welcomes Ding to “Dragon Central,” a planet in a parallel universe. But Ding might be stuck there forever unless he can get back to the Gateway Tree, which he ran from against Flash’s advice. Now the tree, Ding’s only ticket home, is being guarded by a dangerous dragon. Also perilous are the cannibalistic humanoid Droods. Ding and Flash journey in search of a way home and meet Dunya, a girl from a tribe of ancient Sumerians. Complications arise when a dragon hatchling mistakenly imprints on Dunya—infuriating the creature’s actual mother. To return home, Ding must use his wits while also working through guilt and grief over his mother’s death. In his book, retired pediatrician Briley uses his background to bring a good deal of sympathy and understanding to Ding’s burdens. The boy very much wants to be cool and tough, but covers it up with bravado: “No one and nothing dings Ding,” he yells—while running away. The pace is a bit slow, and the humor can be heavy-handed, as when Flash can’t explain the phrase “in a nutshell” in a nutshell, or when Ding and Flash exchange needling banter. Dunya begs them to “stop carping at each other,” a sentiment that readers may agree with. Debut illustrator Durand brings characters and settings alive with his well-drafted, black-and-white drawings.
An amusing adventure story with a few flaws but great empathy for kids’ feelings.Pub Date: Nov. 20, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-63490-896-2
Page Count: 206
Publisher: Booklocker.com, Inc.
Review Posted Online: Dec. 9, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Harry Potter–like threads spun into a fresh, enjoyable mix of magic and mystery.
A teenage orphan enters a curious school and encounters mysteries and dangerous secrets in this first installment of a debut YA fantasy series.
Life in Croswald is about to change for 16-year-old orphan Ivy, a lowly castle maid in charge of the kitchen “scaldrons,” oven-heating, fire-breathing dragons. Fleeing the castle after a messy scaldron mishap, Ivy hops a strange conveyance that transports her to a school for potential quill-wielding, spell-casting “scrivenists.” (The author’s creative language—students are “sqwinches,” and “hairies” are lanterns housing fairies with luminous hair—is one of the book’s pleasures.) Learning that there is more to her gift for sketching than she realized, Ivy studies spells and the magical properties of inks and quills, but strange things keep happening. Why is an old scrivenist, long thought dead, working in secret? Why is the head of the oddly familiar school moving paintings to the “Forgetting Room” so that no one will remember they existed? How can Ivy get a look at a certain journal stored there, and what does it have to do with her recurrent dream? And why has Ivy drawn the interest of the Dark Queen of Croswald and her truly fearsome Cloaked Brood? The intrigue is layered with such whimsical inventions as one school lunchroom run by ghostly bad cooks and another by a jester who is best avoided, scrivenists who end their lives as tomes in a library, and small houses pulled by a gargantuan flying beast with its own weather system. Yes, there are many Harry Potter–ish elements: a school for young wand-wielders, quirky shops dealing in enchanted student supplies, eccentric characters, spells gone wrong, an evil pursuer. But Night’s blend of magic, danger, and suspense (and a touch of steampunk) is a well-realized, fresh fantasy world all its own, and Ivy is an appealing protagonist of relatable complexity. A few bobbles: Ivy seems to go without food for long stretches; the use of “effected” rather than “affected”; a professor who is both standing and perched on a chair.
Harry Potter–like threads spun into a fresh, enjoyable mix of magic and mystery.Pub Date: July 21, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-9969486-5-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Stories Untold Press
Review Posted Online: June 16, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
In this riveting futuristic novel, Spaz, a teenage boy with epilepsy, makes a dangerous journey in the company of an old man and a young boy. The old man, Ryter, one of the few people remaining who can read and write, has dedicated his life to recording stories. Ryter feels a kinship with Spaz, who unlike his contemporaries has a strong memory; because of his epilepsy, Spaz cannot use the mind probes that deliver entertainment straight to the brain and rot it in the process. Nearly everyone around him uses probes to escape their life of ruin and poverty, the result of an earthquake that devastated the world decades earlier. Only the “proovs,” genetically improved people, have grass, trees, and blue skies in their aptly named Eden, inaccessible to the “normals” in the Urb. When Spaz sets out to reach his dying younger sister, he and his companions must cross three treacherous zones ruled by powerful bosses. Moving from one peril to the next, they survive only with help from a proov woman. Enriched by Ryter’s allusions to nearly lost literature and full of intriguing, invented slang, the skillful writing paints two pictures of what the world could look like in the future—the burned-out Urb and the pristine Eden—then shows the limits and strengths of each. Philbrick, author of Freak the Mighty (1993) has again created a compelling set of characters that engage the reader with their courage and kindness in a painful world that offers hope, if no happy endings. (Fiction. 10-14)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-439-08758-9
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Blue Sky/Scholastic
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2000
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