Even sans actual rodents, just about as wild as one might hope the West can get.
Waldo only dreams, now and then, that his parents turn themselves into a squirrel and a prairie dog.
The rest—the flying house, the hijacking, the wild aerial race, and climactic dust-up with the “dastardliest criminal in the world”—turns out to be all too real. The “heavyset” lad (“chubby,” to quote fierce but frank ally Iris, who also goes by “Shorty” because she’s 3 feet tall) is annoyed but not too surprised one 1891 morning to discover that his brilliant if remote inventor parents, Sharon and McLaron, have turned the house into a flying machine to enter a certain continent-spanning race. Numerous obstacles to winning first prize arise on the way, including a competitor’s hurled bananas and a holdup by criminally decent Rose Blackwood in an effort to prove herself to her evil clan by springing her older brother, Benedict, the Arizona Territory’s most fearsome bandit, from jail. Benedict turns out to be a baddie, all right, but no match for the Barons and Rose. Plans go wrong but turn right by the end, just in time for Waldo’s 11th birthday and a new invention, inspired by his recurrent dream, that promises further distinctly unusual family adventures. In Grochalska’s scattered vignettes there is some diversity of skin color in crowd scenes, but Waldo and the rest of the main cast are white.
Even sans actual rodents, just about as wild as one might hope the West can get. (Adventure. 10-13)Pub Date: May 16, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-944995-13-3
Page Count: 242
Publisher: Amberjack Publishing
Review Posted Online: Jan. 31, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
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
Series fans, at least, will take this outing (and clear evidence of more to come) in stride.
Zipping back and forth in time atop outsized robo–bell bottoms, mad inventor Tippy Tinkletrousers (aka Professor Poopypants) legs his way to center stage in this slightly less-labored continuation of episode 9.
The action commences after a rambling recap and a warning not to laugh or smile on pain of being forced to read Sarah Plain and Tall. Pilkey first sends his peevish protagonist back a short while to save the Earth (destroyed in the previous episode), then on to various prehistoric eras in pursuit of George, Harold and the Captain. It’s all pretty much an excuse for many butt jokes, dashes of off-color humor (“Tippy pressed the button on his Freezy-Beam 4000, causing it to rise from the depths of his Robo-Pants”), a lengthy wordless comic and two tussles in “Flip-o-rama.” Still, the chase kicks off an ice age, the extinction of the dinosaurs and the Big Bang (here the Big “Ka-Bloosh!”). It ends with a harrowing glimpse of what George and Harold would become if they decided to go straight. The author also chucks in a poopy-doo-doo song with musical notation (credited to Albert P. Einstein) and plenty of ink-and-wash cartoon illustrations to crank up the ongoing frenzy.
Series fans, at least, will take this outing (and clear evidence of more to come) in stride. (Fantasy. 10-12)Pub Date: Jan. 15, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-545-17536-4
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Scholastic
Review Posted Online: Dec. 12, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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