On a future Earth, 12-year-old Ellie pilots a fighter pod from an orbiting space station to England. Although she’s determined to reunite with her parents and twin brother Mika, she is recaptured by government agents. How Mika discovers the secrets of their dystopian society and begins to seek a peaceful solution to them propels the exciting, suspenseful plot. In fact, this compulsive read should not be started at bedtime if readers intend to get any sleep. Echoes of Ender’s Game and the Tripod Trilogy lend interest to Clayton’s skillful blending of science-fiction tropes into an original novel. Transportation pods, monstrous cyborg animals, advanced healing techniques and the scientific study of ESP provide the details that make this world work. The book’s climax, although satisfying in itself, does not resolve all readers’ questions or tie up the loose ends that provide an enticing glimpse of possibilities for future volumes. Since it ends with a walloping cliffhanger, here’s hoping a sequel appears in our not-too-distant future. (Science fiction. 10-12)
Pub Date: April 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-439-92593-8
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Chicken House/Scholastic
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
A droll and clever opener likely to leave readers breathless both with laughter and anticipation.
The fourth wall suffers major breaches as young characters from a popular fantasy series and the "real real world" join forces to battle threats in both.
Born of a real mother and a fictional dad, Bethany has been searching for her father ever since he disappeared into a book on her fourth birthday. When classmate Owen sees her materializing out of a copy of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, she unwillingly acquires a gobsmacked ally who persuades her to pick up a finding spell from the cliffhanger scene at the end of Volume 6 in his adored Kiel Gnomenfoot series. Owen tags along to do the unthinkable: change the plot by saving the Dumbledore-ish Magister from death at the hands of mad scientist and archvillain Dr. Verity. Crises snowball as Owen finds himself caught in a climactic battle between Magic and Science in the yet-to-be-published seventh volume. Meanwhile, Bethany is left on this side of the printed page to somehow prevent the Magister, enraged by the revelation that he's fictional, from freeing all made-up people and creatures and exiling their creators into a storybook to see how they like having no free will. Riley concocts a tasty mix of familiar tropes and truly inventive twists for his Gnomenfoot scenario plus a set of broadly rendered scene stealers for a supporting cast. For a plot, he dishes up a nonstop barrage of situational pickles for his increasingly desperate protagonists.
A droll and clever opener likely to leave readers breathless both with laughter and anticipation. (Fantasy. 10-12)Pub Date: Jan. 20, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4814-0919-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Aladdin
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2014
This middle-grade read is heartfelt, but nostalgia that’s a bit too on the nose makes it hard to follow
Twelve-year-old aspiring astronaut Ebony-Grace Norfleet Freeman is lonely and homesick in New York.
When trouble hits her family like an asteroid, Ebony-Grace, aka Cadet E-Grace Starfleet, is forced to leave her beloved grandfather and her hometown of Huntsville, Alabama, to spend a week with her father in Harlem, New York—or as she calls it, “No Joke City.” Determined to ignore what she calls the “Sonic Boom,” New York’s hip-hop revolution in the early 1980s, Ebony-Grace rejects the people, music, and movements of Harlem, instead blasting off in her mind aboard the Mothership Uhura to save her grandfather, Capt. Fleet. Stuck, Ebony-Grace works to navigate a new frontier where she is teased and called “crazy” because of her imaginative intergalactic adventures. Ostracized as a flava-less, “plain ol’ ice cream sandwich! Chocolate on the outside, vanilla on the inside,” Ebony-Grace tries her best to be “regular and normal,” but her outer-space imaginings are the only things that keep her grounded. The design includes images that sho nuff bring the ’80s alive: comic-strip panels, inverted Star Wars scripting, and onomatopoeic graffiti-esque words. Unfortunately, these serve to interrupt an already-crowded narrative as readers hyperjump between Ebony-Grace’s imagination and the movement of life in the real world, transmitted via news reports and subway memorials.
This middle-grade read is heartfelt, but nostalgia that’s a bit too on the nose makes it hard to follow . (Historical fiction. 10-12)Pub Date: Aug. 27, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-399-18735-3
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: May 7, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2019
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