What are the chances that a granted wish will go off without a hitch—particularly when both the Fairy Godmother and the Narrator are ham-handed bumblers? Rightly regarding their hereditary right to one wish each as a curse, both the aristocratic Battersbys and their American branch, the Stevens family, have forbidden their offspring to make even idle wishes, ever. Enter black-sheep relative the Duchess Chessimyn of Cheshire, who pops up when geeky teen Ralph Stevens visits his three heretofore-unmet British cousins, and persuades the young folk to defy their parents’ ban. Disasters ensue. First, idealistic cousin Cecil’s efforts to liberate a land of downtrodden fairies kill his gloomy half-sister Beatrice. Then Ralph enters into a determined search through Purgatory’s rival cities of the “Recently-Living” and the more gruesomely decomposed “Soon-to-be-Dead” for Beatrice’s spirit. The confusion is compounded by the intrusive and increasingly ill-tempered Narrator’s efforts to maintain control of the unruly plot. By the end events have taken such a turn for the surreal that a hastily summoned Review Board of the Royal Narratological Society has to step in to right matters. The self-conscious metafictional folderol is likely to lose more readers than it gains, but Archer (pseudonym for YA suspense novelist Eliot Schrefer) creates engaging characters and telling throwaway lines and ultimately wrestles the family conflict at the core of this into a sort of resolution. (Fantasy. 11-13)
Pub Date: April 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-545-16040-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Scholastic
Review Posted Online: April 6, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2011
If it were a Golden Age comic, this tale of ridiculous science, space dogs and humanoid aliens with flashlights in their hands might not be bad. Alas... Number Four is a fugitive from the planet Lorien, which is sloppily described as both "hundreds of lightyears away" and "billions of miles away." Along with eight other children and their caretakers, Number Four escaped from the Mogadorian invasion of Lorien ten years ago. Now the nine children are scattered on Earth, hiding. Luckily and fairly nonsensically, the planet's Elders cast a charm on them so they could only be killed in numerical order, but children one through three are dead, and Number Four is next. Too bad he's finally gained a friend and a girlfriend and doesn't want to run. At least his newly developing alien powers means there will be screen-ready combat and explosions. Perhaps most idiotic, "author" Pittacus Lore is a character in this fiction—but the first-person narrator is someone else entirely. Maybe this is a natural extension of lightly hidden actual author James Frey's drive to fictionalize his life, but literature it ain't. (Science fiction. 11-13)
Pub Date: Aug. 17, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-06-196955-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2010
Ebulliently original.
Who can't love a story about a Nigerian-American 12-year-old with albinism who discovers latent magical abilities and saves the world?
Sunny lives in Nigeria after spending the first nine years of her life in New York. She can't play soccer with the boys because, as she says, "being albino made the sun my enemy," and she has only enemies at school. When a boy in her class, Orlu, rescues her from a beating, Sunny is drawn in to a magical world she's never known existed. Sunny, it seems, is a Leopard person, one of the magical folk who live in a world mostly populated by ignorant Lambs. Now she spends the day in mundane Lamb school and sneaks out at night to learn magic with her cadre of Leopard friends: a handsome American bad boy, an arrogant girl who is Orlu’s childhood friend and Orlu himself. Though Sunny's initiative is thin—she is pushed into most of her choices by her friends and by Leopard adults—the worldbuilding for Leopard society is stellar, packed with details that will enthrall readers bored with the same old magical worlds. Meanwhile, those looking for a touch of the familiar will find it in Sunny's biggest victories, which are entirely non-magical (the detailed dynamism of Sunny's soccer match is more thrilling than her magical world saving).
Ebulliently original. (Fantasy. 11-13)Pub Date: April 14, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-670-01196-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2011
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