Alas for sequelitis, which so often produces watered-down offspring from even the most venerable parentage! When the great aerialist and his carrot-topped young partner cap off their European tour with a performance in St. Petersburg, Mirette comments on all the impoverished peasants; Bellini, with the encouragement of some friends, assures the crowd that they will one day be free. The czar's soldiers arrest him. The next night, having conveniently located Bellini's cell window, Mirette walks a wire (shot by a handy crossbow) in darkness and hands him a hacksaw. A page later they're in Paris. While McCully informs her figures and turn-of-the-century locales with the same grace and vigor that earned Mirette on the High Wire (1991) its Caldecott Medal, small vignette illustrations on two spreads seem, confusingly, suspended in midair; in the arrest scene, Mirette's costume is slightly different in scenes on the wire, platform, and ground. Combined with the agenda-laden, drastically abbreviated plotline, such bobbles, though minor, ground this follow-up. (Picture book. 6-9)
Pub Date: April 14, 1997
ISBN: 0-399-22636-2
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1997
Perfectly paced and bursting with laughs, the tale will appeal to fans of humor and reluctant readers alike, who will...
Chewing gum imbues a girl with gooey superpowers in this laugh-out-loud early chapter book.
Gabby Gomez loves chewing gum, anyplace, anytime—even in her sleep. So when she wakes up with gum stuck in her hair, her mother decides she’s had enough and outlaws the sticky substance. Poor Gabby doesn’t mean to disobey her mother, but when she discovers a piece of MIGHTY-MEGA ULTRA-STRETCHY SUPER-DUPER EXTENDA-BUBBLE BUBBLE GUM, she can’t resist. The special gum results in the biggest bubble ever, and when it pops, the outcome is not just a gum-covered girl, but one with sudden, gummy superpowers. Gabby’s new powers enable her to help people in need, but the price of hiding them from her mom is hard to bear. Using a successful blend of traditional prose, dialogue bubbles and bold-lined, black-and-white illustrations, Montijo delivers laughs all the way through, ensuring that the “moral” never hampers the fun. The one place Montijo stumbles is in the disappointing portrayal of class bully Natalie Gooch, a stereotypically large, boyish-looking girl; there are plenty of small “girly-girls” who are horrible bullies—let’s see more of those.
Perfectly paced and bursting with laughs, the tale will appeal to fans of humor and reluctant readers alike, who will identify with Gabby’s sticky situation. (Fiction/graphic hybrid. 6-9)Pub Date: Aug. 20, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4231-5740-3
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Disney-Hyperion
Review Posted Online: April 2, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2013
Returning fans will be happy to see their friends, but this outing's unlikely to win them new ones.
In the second installment of the Binder of Doom series, readers will reconnect with Alexander Bopp, who leads the Super Secret Monster Patrol, a group of mutant children who protect the citizens of their beloved town of Stermont.
His friends Nikki and Rip rejoin him to add new monsters and adventures to their ever growing binder of monsters. As in series opener Brute-Cake (2019), Alexander and his friends attend the local library’s summer program, this time for “maker-camp.” They are assigned a Maker Challenge, in which each camper is to “make a machine that performs a helpful task”; meanwhile, mechanical equipment is being stolen all over Stermont. Unfortunately, the pacing and focus of the book hop all over the place. The titular boa constructor (a two-headed maker-minded snake and the culprit behind the thefts) is but one of many monsters introduced here, appearing more than two-thirds of the way through the story—just after the Machine Share-Time concludes the maker-camp plotline. (Rip’s “most dangerous” invention does come in handy at the climax.) The grayscale illustrations add visuals that will keep early readers engaged despite the erratic storyline; they depict Alexander with dark skin and puffy hair and Nikki and Rip with light skin. Monster trading cards are interleaved with the story.
Returning fans will be happy to see their friends, but this outing's unlikely to win them new ones. (Paranormal adventure. 6-8)Pub Date: Sept. 3, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-338-31469-4
Page Count: 96
Publisher: Scholastic
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2019
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