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
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
Much rousing sturm und drang, though what’s left after the dust settles is a heap of glittering but disparate good parts...
Scott tops off his deservedly popular series with a heaping shovelful of monster attacks, heroic last stands, earthquakes and other geological events, magic-working, millennia-long schemes coming to fruition, hearts laid bare, family revelations, transformations, redemptions and happy endings (for those deserving them).
Multiple plotlines—some of which, thanks to time travel, feature the same characters and even figures killed off in previous episodes—come to simultaneous heads in a whirl of short chapters. Flamel and allies (including Prometheus and Billy the Kid) defend modern San Francisco from a motley host of mythological baddies. Meanwhile, in ancient Danu Talis (aka Atlantis), Josh and Sophie are being swept into a play to bring certain Elders to power as the city’s downtrodden “humani” population rises up behind Virginia Dare, the repentant John Dee and other Immortals and Elders. The cast never seems unwieldy despite its size, the pacing never lets up, and the individual set pieces are fine mixtures of sudden action, heroic badinage and cliffhanger cutoffs. As a whole, though, the tale collapses under its own weight as the San Francisco subplots turn out to be no more than an irrelevant sideshow, and climactic conflicts take place on an island that is somehow both a historical, physical place and a higher reality from which Earth and other “shadowrealms” are spun off.
Much rousing sturm und drang, though what’s left after the dust settles is a heap of glittering but disparate good parts rather than a cohesive whole. (Fantasy. 11-13)Pub Date: May 22, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-385-73535-3
Page Count: 528
Publisher: Delacorte
Review Posted Online: May 29, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2012
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