Claire's entertaining exchanges with a campus cat stand out as fresh and enjoyable; the rest is painfully derivative.
Mysterious goings-on at a boarding school for paranormally talented students feel very, very familiar.
Alone in her family, Claire is unexceptional. While Claire has attended the public high school, telekinetic brother Billy and medium sister Charlotte go to Cambial, a boarding school for children with paranormal abilities, and her parents (father: code breaker; mother: truth seeker) are administrators there. A night of partying gone wrong finds her enrolled at Cambial. She quickly settles in with teachers and students, most agreeable, some not. But it turns out she is exceptional after all: She can hear animals' thoughts. While secretly practicing in the woods, she encounters Dylan, a mysterious and "exceptionally handsome" young man with "long, dark eyelashes framing beautiful green eyes." Even as the students prep for the annual telekinesis tournament, some of their most talented begin to disappear. It appears an enemy of Cambial is not dead but instead determined to bring it down. It will take a Chosen One to thwart him. Well-worn characters and plot churn their way toward a climax with the deranged villain, who explains his entire plot to the gathered protagonists. Readers will likely find Claire's embarrassingly instantaneous attraction to Dylan both stupid and distasteful.
Claire's entertaining exchanges with a campus cat stand out as fresh and enjoyable; the rest is painfully derivative. (Paranormal romance/mystery. 11-15)Pub Date: April 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-8234-2335-4
Page Count: 236
Publisher: Holiday House
Review Posted Online: Feb. 21, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
Despite the stale fat-to-curvy pattern, compelling world building with a Southern European, pseudo-Christian feel,...
Adventure drags our heroine all over the map of fantasyland while giving her the opportunity to use her smarts.
Elisa—Princess Lucero-Elisa de Riqueza of Orovalle—has been chosen for Service since the day she was born, when a beam of holy light put a Godstone in her navel. She's a devout reader of holy books and is well-versed in the military strategy text Belleza Guerra, but she has been kept in ignorance of world affairs. With no warning, this fat, self-loathing princess is married off to a distant king and is embroiled in political and spiritual intrigue. War is coming, and perhaps only Elisa's Godstone—and knowledge from the Belleza Guerra—can save them. Elisa uses her untried strategic knowledge to always-good effect. With a character so smart that she doesn't have much to learn, body size is stereotypically substituted for character development. Elisa’s "mountainous" body shrivels away when she spends a month on forced march eating rat, and thus she is a better person. Still, it's wonderfully refreshing to see a heroine using her brain to win a war rather than strapping on a sword and charging into battle.
Despite the stale fat-to-curvy pattern, compelling world building with a Southern European, pseudo-Christian feel, reminiscent of Naomi Kritzer's Fires of the Faithful (2002), keeps this entry fresh. (Fantasy. 12-14)Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-06-202648-4
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Greenwillow Books
Review Posted Online: July 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2011
If it were a Golden Age comic, this tale of ridiculous science, space dogs and humanoid aliens with flashlights in their hands might not be bad. Alas... Number Four is a fugitive from the planet Lorien, which is sloppily described as both "hundreds of lightyears away" and "billions of miles away." Along with eight other children and their caretakers, Number Four escaped from the Mogadorian invasion of Lorien ten years ago. Now the nine children are scattered on Earth, hiding. Luckily and fairly nonsensically, the planet's Elders cast a charm on them so they could only be killed in numerical order, but children one through three are dead, and Number Four is next. Too bad he's finally gained a friend and a girlfriend and doesn't want to run. At least his newly developing alien powers means there will be screen-ready combat and explosions. Perhaps most idiotic, "author" Pittacus Lore is a character in this fiction—but the first-person narrator is someone else entirely. Maybe this is a natural extension of lightly hidden actual author James Frey's drive to fictionalize his life, but literature it ain't. (Science fiction. 11-13)
Pub Date: Aug. 17, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-06-196955-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2010
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