An enchanting spin on the proverbial cautionary tale of Faerie.
Bookish Agatha lives in a pastoral village where a silky-furred black dog lurks in the shadows.
The dog’s slitted yellow eyes follow Agatha as she moves through the peaceful pastel tones and rounded edges of her everyday world; the illustrations evoke a Victorian English village. Agatha tutors a brown-skinned boy named Peter Garcia, helps her parents with the upkeep of their modest cottage, and fends off unwelcome advances from shop owner’s son Claude. All the while, she dreams of studying astronomy but despairs of the barriers she faces. Agatha steps into a trap laid by the dog, who transforms into the Lady of the Hills (a dapper, pallid woman with the dog’s yellow eyes and flowing black locks), who claims that Agatha owes her a favor. Despite Agatha’s sweet developing romance with Heather Garcia, Peter’s blond cousin, she’s still enchanted by the Lady, who pulls her into magical adventures that are by turns dreamy and upsetting. While Agatha loves the Lady’s starlit dance party in a stone circle, she abhors the consequence she metes out in response to Claude’s persistent attentions. When the Lady’s antics affect Heather, Agatha must take the initiative. Agatha’s curiosity makes her an engaging hero, and the tale’s events unfold at a satisfying pace. The story tempers genuine fear and horror with lighthearted gentleness. Agatha is biracial, with a white father and a brown-skinned, black-haired mother.
An enchanting spin on the proverbial cautionary tale of Faerie. (character sketches) (Graphic fantasy. 9-14)Pub Date: June 25, 2024
ISBN: 9780063247215
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Quill Tree Books/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 23, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2024
Good Guys and Bad get just deserts in the end, and Stanley gets plenty of opportunities to display pluck and valor in this...
Sentenced to a brutal juvenile detention camp for a crime he didn't commit, a wimpy teenager turns four generations of bad family luck around in this sunburnt tale of courage, obsession, and buried treasure from Sachar (Wayside School Gets a Little Stranger, 1995, etc.).
Driven mad by the murder of her black beau, a schoolteacher turns on the once-friendly, verdant town of Green Lake, Texas, becomes feared bandit Kissin' Kate Barlow, and dies, laughing, without revealing where she buried her stash. A century of rainless years later, lake and town are memories—but, with the involuntary help of gangs of juvenile offenders, the last descendant of the last residents is still digging. Enter Stanley Yelnats IV, great-grandson of one of Kissin' Kate's victims and the latest to fall to the family curse of being in the wrong place at the wrong time; under the direction of The Warden, a woman with rattlesnake venom polish on her long nails, Stanley and each of his fellow inmates dig a hole a day in the rock-hard lake bed. Weeks of punishing labor later, Stanley digs up a clue, but is canny enough to conceal the information of which hole it came from. Through flashbacks, Sachar weaves a complex net of hidden relationships and well-timed revelations as he puts his slightly larger-than-life characters under a sun so punishing that readers will be reaching for water bottles.
Good Guys and Bad get just deserts in the end, and Stanley gets plenty of opportunities to display pluck and valor in this rugged, engrossing adventure. (Fiction. 9-13)Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 978-0-374-33265-5
Page Count: 233
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2000
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
Korman’s trademark humor makes this an appealing read.
Will a bully always be a bully?
That’s the question eighth-grade football captain Chase Ambrose has to answer for himself after a fall from his roof leaves him with no memory of who and what he was. When he returns to Hiawassee Middle School, everything and everyone is new. The football players can hardly wait for him to come back to lead the team. Two, Bear Bratsky and Aaron Hakimian, seem to be special friends, but he’s not sure what they share. Other classmates seem fearful; he doesn’t know why. Temporarily barred from football because of his concussion, he finds a new home in the video club and, over time, develops a new reputation. He shoots videos with former bullying target Brendan Espinoza and even with Shoshanna Weber, who’d hated him passionately for persecuting her twin brother, Joel. Chase voluntarily continues visiting the nursing home where he’d been ordered to do community service before his fall, making a special friend of a decorated Korean War veteran. As his memories slowly return and he begins to piece together his former life, he’s appalled. His crimes were worse than bullying. Will he become that kind of person again? Set in the present day and told in the alternating voices of Chase and several classmates, this finding-your-middle-school-identity story explores provocative territory. Aside from naming conventions, the book subscribes to the white default.
Korman’s trademark humor makes this an appealing read. (Fiction. 9-14)Pub Date: May 30, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-338-05377-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Scholastic
Review Posted Online: March 19, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2017
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