Lots of tried and true bits capably, if somewhat arbitrarily, assembled.
An orphan comes into a fabulous inheritance only to discover that it not only needs defending, but is more a curse than a blessing.
Raised by her enigmatic grandfather, who sells such magical curiosities as strap-on wings, 15-year-old Spindrift knows only that her parents died at sea until a strange customer’s inquiry touches off a chain of astonishing revelations. It seems that the Seven Sages who created the world distilled their essences in the forms of orchids into seven colored crystal balls long ago, and one of them, a black one that can grant certain limited kinds of wishes, has come down in Spindrift’s family. Moreover, after her grandfather reluctantly shares a trove of letters, she learns that her parents had set out to gather the rest but had been betrayed and killed by none other than Roland, the man who had come to the shop. Knowing that Roland already has five of the crystals—and also that they cause far more harm than good—Spindrift sets out both to recover the long-hidden sixth and exact revenge. Trevayne tucks in oblique clues, motif-building references, a neatly disposed-of bully, dark-skinned twins as allies for Spindrift (everyone else in the cast presents as white), a single encounter with an eerie street person, and other elements as if she were checking them off a list.
Lots of tried and true bits capably, if somewhat arbitrarily, assembled. (Fantasy. 11-13)Pub Date: May 8, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-4814-6259-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: March 26, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Narrow squeaks aplenty combine with bursts of lyrical prose for a satisfying adventure
A Prohibition-era child enlists a gifted pickpocket and a pair of budding circus performers in a clever ruse to save her ancestral home from being stolen by developers.
Rundell sets her iron-jawed protagonist on a seemingly impossible quest: to break into the ramshackle Hudson River castle from which her grieving grandfather has been abruptly evicted by unscrupulous con man Victor Sorrotore and recover a fabulously valuable hidden emerald. Laying out an elaborate scheme in a notebook that itself turns out to be an integral part of the ensuing caper, Vita, only slowed by a bout with polio years before, enlists a team of helpers. Silk, a light-fingered orphan, aspiring aerialist Samuel Kawadza, and Arkady, a Russian lad with a remarkable affinity for and with animals, all join her in a series of expeditions, mostly nocturnal, through and under Manhattan. The city never comes to life the way the human characters do (Vita, for instance, “had six kinds of smile, and five of them were real”) but often does have a tangible presence, and notwithstanding Vita’s encounter with a (rather anachronistically styled) “Latina” librarian, period attitudes toward race and class are convincingly drawn. Vita, Silk, and Arkady all present white; Samuel, a Shona immigrant from Southern Rhodesia, is the only primary character of color. Santoso’s vignettes of, mostly, animals and small items add occasional visual grace notes.
Narrow squeaks aplenty combine with bursts of lyrical prose for a satisfying adventure . (Historical fiction. 11-13)Pub Date: Aug. 27, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-4814-1948-2
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 25, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2019
Clever as ever—if slow off the mark—and positively laden with tics, quirks, and puns.
When deadly minions of archvillain Ledroptha Curtain escape from prison, the talented young protégés of his twin brother, Nicholas Benedict, reunite for a new round of desperate ploys and ingenious trickery.
Stewart sets the reunion of cerebral Reynie Muldoon Perumal, hypercapable Kate Wetherall, shy scientific genius George “Sticky” Washington, and spectacularly sullen telepath Constance Contraire a few years after the previous episode, The Mysterious Benedict Society and the Prisoner’s Dilemma (2009). Providing relief from the quartet’s continual internecine squabbling and self-analysis, he trucks in Tai Li, a grubby, precociously verbal 5-year-old orphan who also happens to be telepathic. (Just to even the playing field a bit, the bad guys get a telepath too.) Series fans will know to be patient in wading through all the angst, arguments, and flurries of significant nose-tapping (occasionally in unison), for when the main action does at long last get under way—the five don’t even set out from Mr. Benedict’s mansion together until more than halfway through—the Society returns to Nomansan Island (get it?), the site of their first mission, for chases, narrow squeaks, hastily revised stratagems, and heroic exploits that culminate in a characteristically byzantine whirl of climactic twists, triumphs, and revelations. Except for brown-skinned George and olive-complected, presumably Asian-descended Tai, the central cast defaults to white; Reynie’s adoptive mother is South Asian.
Clever as ever—if slow off the mark—and positively laden with tics, quirks, and puns. (Fiction. 11-13)Pub Date: Sept. 24, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-316-45264-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Megan Tingley/Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: April 27, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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