A crazed professional poacher and the elephant who smashed his leg 50 years before meet again in this brutal, melodramatic sequel to The Place of Lions (1991). In his hidden storeroom on the lifeless volcanic slopes of Tanzania’s Ol Doinyo Lengai, Laurens van der Wel has gathered thousands of tusks, but his special prey, known to the Masai as Papa Tembo, “Father Elephant,” remains elusive. About to slaughter another elephant family, van der Wel suddenly herds them instead into a close and torches it, sure that their screams will draw Papa Tembo, which they do. The prose is often colorful—“Only the carrion eaters had done well that year, the sly hyenas and gargoyle vultures lazily plying their putrescent trade”—but Campbell’s generalizations about Africa (e.g., “A world of magic and ancient savagery where life meant little,”) evoke a now-musty colonialism, and he adds characters more for didactic purposes than to enhance the plot: a scientist and his two teenage children to observe—at length—elephant behavior, and a pair of anti-poacher vigilantes from the previous book. They all come together in the smoke-filled climax in which Papa Tembo crushes the slobbering, gun-waving van der Wel into a pulp, then calmly allows the other humans to help the captured elephants escape. A long and tumid story, with little to see readers through beyond some lurid writing and, for those with a proclivity for such carnage, the expectation of gory just deserts. (glossary) (Fiction. 11-13)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-15-201727-5
Page Count: 265
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Awful on a number of levels—but tidily over at last.
The rebellion against an evil archmage and his bowler-topped minions wends its way to a climax.
Dispatching five baddies on the first two pages alone, wand-waving villain-exterminator Vega Jane gathers a motley army of fellow magicals, ghosts, and muggles—sorry, “Wugmorts”—for a final assault on Necro and his natty Maladons. As Necro repeatedly proves to be both smarter and more powerful than Vega Jane, things generally go badly for the rebels, who end up losing their hidden refuge, many of their best fighters, and even the final battle. Baldacci is plainly up on his ancient Greek theatrical conventions, however; just as all hope is lost, a divinity literally descends from the ceiling to referee a winner-take-all duel, and thanks to an earlier ritual that (she and readers learn) gives her a do-over if she’s killed (a second deus ex machina!), Vega Jane comes away with a win…not to mention an engagement ring to go with the magic one that makes her invisible and a new dog, just like the one that died heroically. Measuring up to the plot’s low bar, the narrative too reads like low-grade fanfic, being laden with references to past events, characters who only supposedly died, and such lines as “a spurt of blood shot out from my forehead,” “they started falling at a rapid number,” and “[h]is statement struck me on a number of levels.”
Awful on a number of levels—but tidily over at last. (glossary) (Fantasy. 11-13)Pub Date: Feb. 26, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-338-26393-0
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Scholastic
Review Posted Online: March 26, 2019
Miah’s melodramatic death overshadows a tale as rich in social and personal insight as any of Woodson’s previous books.
In a meditative interracial love story with a wrenching climactic twist, Woodson (The House You Pass on the Way, 1997, etc.) offers an appealing pair of teenagers and plenty of intellectual grist, before ending her story with a senseless act of violence.
Jeremiah and Elisha bond from the moment they collide in the hall of their Manhattan prep school: He’s the only child of celebrity parents; she’s the youngest by ten years in a large family. Not only sharply sensitive to the reactions of those around them, Ellie and Miah also discover depths and complexities in their own intense feelings that connect clearly to their experiences, their social environment, and their own characters. In quiet conversations and encounters, Woodson perceptively explores varieties of love, trust, and friendship, as she develops well-articulated histories for both families. Suddenly Miah, forgetting his father’s warning never to be seen running in a white neighborhood, exuberantly dashes into a park and is shot down by police. The parting thought that, willy-nilly, time moves on will be a colder comfort for stunned readers than it evidently is for Ellie.
Miah’s melodramatic death overshadows a tale as rich in social and personal insight as any of Woodson’s previous books. (Fiction. 11-13)Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-399-23112-9
Page Count: 181
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1998
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