A witty and fun tale for sophisticated readers unafraid of a little challenge.
Magic, menstruation, and hockey form an unlikely triumvirate.
Under normal circumstances, getting your first period doesn’t make the news. Alas, Hayley Rilko isn’t a typical 14-year-old. Thanks to a well-known sports curse invoked when her great-grandfather, a legendary hockey player, died in a plane crash, everyone in Hayley’s family must quit the sport after adolescence sets in—any team they play for is doomed to losing streaks. But Hayley resolves to do the impossible, with the help of her cousins: raise the spirit of their departed ancestor, find his bones in the Northern Ontario woods, and break their curse at last. Johnston plays off sports fans’ natural inclinations toward superstition by creating a world where sports curses are documented and dangerous. Marvelous little “intermissions” weave famous real-world curses that some kids may recognize into the tale. Snappy dialogue moves the narrative along at a fast clip, though some of it (“Sexual dimorphism is stupid”), along with undefined terms like muskeg, may confound younger readers; others, however, will be drawn in. A family tree will help readers navigate the large cast of family members. The occasional use of profanity suggests that this is, perhaps, a better choice for slightly older readers. Characters present white.
A witty and fun tale for sophisticated readers unafraid of a little challenge. (Fiction. 11-14)Pub Date: Aug. 11, 2026
ISBN: 9798217110421
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: May 4, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2026
A sly, side-splitting hoot from start to finish.
The dreary prospect of spending a lifetime making caskets instead of wonderful inventions prompts a young orphan to snatch up his little sister and flee. Where? To the circus, of course.
Fortunately or otherwise, John and 6-year-old Page join up with Boz—sometime human cannonball for the seedy Wandering Wayfarers and a “vertically challenged” trickster with a fantastic gift for sowing chaos. Alas, the budding engineer barely has time to settle in to begin work on an experimental circus wagon powered by chicken poop and dubbed (with questionable forethought) the Autopsy. The hot pursuit of malign and indomitable Great-Aunt Beauregard, the Coggins’ only living relative, forces all three to leave the troupe for further flights and misadventures. Teele spins her adventure around a sturdy protagonist whose love for his little sister is matched only by his fierce desire for something better in life for them both and tucks in an outstanding supporting cast featuring several notably strong-minded, independent women (Page, whose glare “would kill spiders dead,” not least among them). Better yet, in Boz she has created a scene-stealing force of nature, a free spirit who’s never happier than when he’s stirring up mischief. A climactic clutch culminating in a magnificently destructive display of fireworks leaves the Coggin sibs well-positioned for bright futures. (Illustrations not seen.)
A sly, side-splitting hoot from start to finish. (Adventure. 11-13)Pub Date: April 12, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-06-234510-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Walden Pond Press/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
Not for the faint of heart or stomach (or maybe of any parts) but sure to be appreciated by middle school zombie cognoscenti.
Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle meets Left for Dead/The Walking Dead/Shaun of the Dead in a high-energy, high-humor look at the zombie apocalypse, complete with baseball (rather than cricket) bats.
The wholesome-seeming Iowa cornfields are a perfect setting for the emergence of ghastly anomalies: flesh-eating cows and baseball-coach zombies. The narrator hero, Rabi (for Rabindranath), and his youth baseball teammates and friends, Miguel and Joe, discover by chance that all is not well with their small town’s principal industry: the Milrow corporation’s giant feedlot and meat-production and -packing facility. The ponds of cow poo and crammed quarters for the animals are described in gaggingly smelly detail, and the bone-breaking, bloody, flesh-smashing encounters with the zombies have a high gross-out factor. The zombie cows and zombie humans who emerge from the muck are apparently a product of the food supply gone cuckoo in service of big-money profits with little concern for the end result. It’s up to Rabi and his pals to try to prove what’s going on—and to survive the corporation’s efforts to silence them. Much as Bacigalupi’s Ship Breaker (2010) was a clarion call to action against climate change, here’s a signal alert to young teens to think about what they eat, while the considerable appeal of the characters and plot defies any preachiness.
Not for the faint of heart or stomach (or maybe of any parts) but sure to be appreciated by middle school zombie cognoscenti. (Fiction. 11-14)Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-316-22078-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: June 25, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2013
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