Throwing shadows, kindling flames: each of the five innocuous short stories included here ends in a sort of character-defining gesture or understanding. In the first Ned, a young shark-tooth collector in Florida, hands over a prize find to an envious, pesty old man. Another boy's mother exhibits similar generosity toward an antique-dealer couple who got her started in the business but resent her superior talent for it. In an old people's home, young Phillip tapes a crusty Hungarian lady's life story, then does both her and the other inmates a good turn by arranging for her to tape the others for the institution's library—but their universal eagerness is simplistically overdone; and when Phillip is tacitly rebuked by one old lady's blue tattoo from Auschwitz, the reference seems merely inappropriate, the story too bland to justify its use. Avery, who complains of being a "catchee"—police keep stopping him for what only seems like thievery or whatever—is reassured by his older brother that the experience will make him "very honest and very brave." And a young Ecuadorean tour guide helps a hustling village boy to learn that the voice of true manhood need not be loud. In the first two stories the shark-tooth collector's mother is said to be from Thailand, though she sounds American if anything, and the "catchee" refers once to his black skin, though his tone again is just homogenized American—so why? All the stories are more rounded and sprinkled with anecdote than what is usually called didactic in children's fiction, yet all the characters—and their stories—are so reduced to those final moments of truth or virtue shining forth that the experience is a mild and managed one.
Pub Date: Aug. 14, 1979
ISBN: 1416949593
Page Count: 182
Publisher: Atheneum
Review Posted Online: May 1, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Good Guys and Bad get just deserts in the end, and Stanley gets plenty of opportunities to display pluck and valor in this...
Sentenced to a brutal juvenile detention camp for a crime he didn't commit, a wimpy teenager turns four generations of bad family luck around in this sunburnt tale of courage, obsession, and buried treasure from Sachar (Wayside School Gets a Little Stranger, 1995, etc.).
Driven mad by the murder of her black beau, a schoolteacher turns on the once-friendly, verdant town of Green Lake, Texas, becomes feared bandit Kissin' Kate Barlow, and dies, laughing, without revealing where she buried her stash. A century of rainless years later, lake and town are memories—but, with the involuntary help of gangs of juvenile offenders, the last descendant of the last residents is still digging. Enter Stanley Yelnats IV, great-grandson of one of Kissin' Kate's victims and the latest to fall to the family curse of being in the wrong place at the wrong time; under the direction of The Warden, a woman with rattlesnake venom polish on her long nails, Stanley and each of his fellow inmates dig a hole a day in the rock-hard lake bed. Weeks of punishing labor later, Stanley digs up a clue, but is canny enough to conceal the information of which hole it came from. Through flashbacks, Sachar weaves a complex net of hidden relationships and well-timed revelations as he puts his slightly larger-than-life characters under a sun so punishing that readers will be reaching for water bottles.
Good Guys and Bad get just deserts in the end, and Stanley gets plenty of opportunities to display pluck and valor in this rugged, engrossing adventure. (Fiction. 9-13)Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 978-0-374-33265-5
Page Count: 233
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2000
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
A charming friendship story and great setup for future books.
Curious about the Big Wide World outside his Sasquatch community, Hugo makes a friend who is of it.
Sasquatch Hugo’s bedroom is inside a cave and possesses the charming feature of a small stream running through it that he can sail his little toy boat on. It’s cool, but he yearns to see the Big Wide World. When he asks his smart friend Gigi if a Sasquatch might become a sailor, she says it’s possible but would be difficult—the primary rule of their people is to not be seen by Humans. Then, in everyone’s favorite Hide and Go Sneak class, which is held outside, a Human appears; Hugo laughs at the sight, drawing Human attention in a taboo-breaking mistake. Shortly after, Hugo’s toy boat floats into the cave with a Human toy—soon, it’s facilitating a pen-pal–type relationship that’s derailed when Hugo confesses to being a Sasquatch and Human Boone, a budding cryptozoologist, doesn’t believe him. How Hugo and Boone resolve this misapprehension and become friends in a joint search for the Ogopogo concludes this series opener. Potter keeps the third-person narrative tightly focused on Hugo’s perspective, and the details she uses to flesh out the Sasquatch world are delightfully playful. Sala’s drawings depict a homey Sasquatch cavern community, Boone as a freckled, white boy, and Hugo as a hairily benevolent behemoth.
A charming friendship story and great setup for future books. (final art unseen) (Fantasy. 5-9)Pub Date: April 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-4197-2859-4
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Amulet/Abrams
Review Posted Online: Dec. 10, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2018
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