A tough, ambitious, and courageous heroine is always welcome, and Margo and Charles are an odd couple kids will enjoy...
In the grand tradition of childhood adventures executed free from adult interference, this graphic novel takes readers on escapades involving two young monster hunters and the ghosts, goblins, and other wicked beasties lurking in the underbelly of their city.
Reluctantly relocated to a fictional location reminiscent of New York City, Charles takes up residence with his mother and father in a dilapidated historic hotel where he soon makes two new friends: Kevin, a black boy determined to set a world record of some sort, and Margo Maloo, self-styled “monster mediator,” a brown-skinned, pointy-featured girl whose glossy black hair flips in a manner strangely reminiscent of the collar of Dracula's cape. Charles is an endearing underdog, a chubby white boy who alphabetizes his personal library by subject and pours his aspiring journalistic ambitions into his blog. Over the course of three chapters, Margo helps Charles with the monster that emerges from his closet and, after some badgering, allows him to tag along as she answers pleas from other monster-plagued humans. Frequent humorous touches temper the fear factor for younger readers, while references to more advanced concepts such as gentrification add depth for older ones. Clever dialogue enhances this intriguing and multilayered story set in a fully realized world of monster and human coexistence.
A tough, ambitious, and courageous heroine is always welcome, and Margo and Charles are an odd couple kids will enjoy rooting for. (Graphic fantasy. 8-12)Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-62672-339-9
Page Count: 130
Publisher: First Second
Review Posted Online: July 1, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Still howling good fun, though the series’ big Reveal doesn’t seem any closer than before.
Resilient as ever, in the third installment of Wood’s deliciously melodramatic Victorian mystery teenage governess Penelope Lumley takes on threats to her wolfish young charges that include a hustler after the Ashton fortune.
The unexpected sighting of an ostrich among the larks and thrushes in the woods near Ashton Place heralds the arrival of bluff Admiral Albert Faucet (“That’s faw-say, my good man. Not faucet”). Once he meets the three feral children Penelope is charged with training up to be human, Faucet’s scheme to finance the introduction of ostrich racing to the British Isles by marrying the Dowager Lady Ashton is transformed to visions of wolf racing and sideshow exhibitions. Fortunately Penelope, proud graduate of the Swanburne Academy for Poor Bright Females, is not only up to that challenge but numerous others. These range from actually riding the aforementioned ostrich and meeting a pack of oversize, strangely intelligent wolves (if wolves they be) to orchestrating a climactic séance designed to contact the Dowager’s first husband, drowned (purportedly) in the medicinal tar pits at Gooden-Baden. Along with gleefully pitching her plucky protagonist into one crisis after another, punctuated by authorial disquisitions on similes, rhetorical questions, contagious punning and other linguistic follies, the author slips in a few more seemingly significant Clues to the Ashtons’ curious history and Penelope’s apparent involvement in it.
Still howling good fun, though the series’ big Reveal doesn’t seem any closer than before. (Melodrama. 10-12)Pub Date: April 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-0061791185
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Balzer + Bray/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Jan. 17, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2012
A seventh-grade history project to "find a mystery, and solve it" transforms a creative preteen and her classmates when she unlocks the secret life of their Music Fundamentals teacher, Ms. Finkleman, who's "so totally unremarkable as to be essentially invisible." Bethesda Fielding's ace research reveals the obscure Ms. Finkleman as Little Miss Mystery, former lead singer of an all-girl punk-rock band in the 1990s, prompting the school principal to demand Ms. Finkleman orchestrate a rock concert for the county choral competition. Ms. Finkleman co-opts Tenny Boyer, a student obsessed with rock music, to covertly create and direct the performance and Bethesda to tutor him in history. Enthusiasm for the concert swells, but things disintegrate when Tenny fails at history and Bethesda makes a bad choice as she tries to help him. Liberally laced with humor and featuring an upbeat heroine, unexpected friendship and rock-music trivia, this witty middle-school drama offers a lighthearted lesson in the importance of getting the facts straight. Readers will rock with laughter. (Fiction. 8-12)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-06-196541-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Aug. 11, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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