A London teenager eagerly follows his father to a new life in Tanzania—and straight into disaster. When their light plane crashes in the Serengeti, only Chris is uninjured enough to go for help. Not only natural dangers stand between him and the nearest settlement; there's also a deadly pair of ivory poachers, who are surprised in action and vengefully chased by an American and a retired game warden who's there on a photographic safari; an aging lion, undertaking his last journey, also closely parallels Chris's course. All these players converge at the climax; meanwhile, the story's drama is heightened by some melodramatic prose (``His gorge still rose as his nostrils caught the heavy stench of animal breath, blood breath, blood stench, blanketing the air in this savage and terrible place'') and by a succession of vividly set scenes. The characters in this all-male adventure (well, there are some female lions) are painted in bold strokes—in the American's case, rather broadly: ``He asks me if I know how to shoot...I'm a New Yorker. In New York you're born knowing how to shoot....'' For fans of Paulsen and other no-frills adventure novelists. (Fiction. 11-15)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1991
ISBN: 0-15-262408-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1991
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The mind behind the redoubtable Captain Underpants teams up with a new illustrator for a new series, featuring a pipsqueak mouse and his humongous metal friend. Enraged when his new robot refuses to destroy nearby Squeakyville, mad doctor Stinky McNasty turns a classroom lizard into a monster with a drop of Hate Potion #9. In the meantime, the robot, having bonded with little Ricky, intimidated the bullies who threw his backpack in the garbage, and taken up residence in his garage, lumbers into battle, saving the day in a flurry of reader-animated “Flip-O-Rama” scenes. In thick-lined cartoons, the hamfisted robot looks like Popeye in sheet metal; the bad guys all have squinty eyes; the fight is all. Children younger than the Captain’s readership may find this droll, but Pilkey’s just treading water; so rudimentary is the plot, so stock the characters, and so free is this of humor, that it may sink like the proverbial lead balloon. (Fiction. 7-9)
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-590-30719-3
Page Count: 112
Publisher: Blue Sky/Scholastic
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1999
Pinkwater shifts locales from Hollywood to Poughkeepsie, N.Y., for this not-exactly-a-sequel to The Yggyssey (2009), but he continues to festoon his newest determinedly errant plot with thinly disguised literary and cultural references. Considering herself just an ordinary girl who happens to have cat eyes and whiskers, Big Audrey fetches up in a town where aliens land behind a certain barn/café for apple fritters on Wednesdays, a mansion built by a colonial “patroon spittoon tycoon” behaves skittishly and strange but somehow familiar figures like a scary Muffin Man and recognizable Wild Things (“Hudson River trolls”) wander through. Naturally (naturally!), a quest ensues to track down a terrifying spirit dubbed the Wolluf and to discover the connection between Big Audrey and a seemingly identical 19th-century lass who vanished suddenly. Well stocked with the usual oddball characters and fabulous throwaway lines (“Doughnuts are not unknown where I come from, but they are not used as food”), the book sails along in an airy and vastly entertaining way to an appropriately daffy resolution. Pinkwater is definitely on a roll—or in this case a fritter. (Fantasy. 11-13)
Pub Date: June 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-547-22324-7
Page Count: 282
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Dec. 27, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2010
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