Enjoyable writing and effective detective work stand out in this series entry.
On a family ski trip, two middle school gumshoes try to solve the mystery of stolen Olympic medals in this fourth installment of a series.
For best friends Whiz Tanner and Joey Dent, both 12, visiting a ski lodge with their families is the first vacation they’ve had since starting their detective agency earlier in the school year. But as readers of this series might expect, detective work finds them. Former Olympic skiers Harrison Revel and his brother, Benjamin, helped build the Marsh River Mountain Ski Resort; on display in the lobby are their three medals of bronze, silver, and gold. A small crowd gathers as Harrison opens the case and shows the medals to the kids. That night, the lodge gets snowed in by a blizzard—and in the morning, the medals are missing. The case that held them is discovered in the garbage, but that’s the only clue, because the lobby’s security cameras are down. The Tanner-Dent Detective Agency swings into action with some help from Madilynn and her younger brother, Wyatt, other kids at the resort. They develop and whittle down a list of suspects, lift fingerprints, and set a trap for the most likely culprit. Can they prevent him from fleeing with the loot? Rexroad (Whiz Tanner and the Mysterious Countdown, 2019, etc.) varies his winning formula with a new setting outside the Jasper Springs Museum, a good way to keep things fresh, with the snowed-in lodge providing a reason that adult authorities can’t get involved. The briskly moving story shows solid sleuthing in the details of acquiring fingerprints, checking alibis, and eliminating suspects. It’s not groundbreaking—the super-glue method of raising prints has been around for decades, for example—but it’s realistic. These well-described scenes help make up for an absent feature of the adventure series, the fancy Tanner-Dent crime lab. The two friends make a good team; Joey’s regular-kid narrative voice contrasts well with Whiz’s precise diction and large vocabulary. Joey also brings courage and ability to action scenes.
Enjoyable writing and effective detective work stand out in this series entry.Pub Date: Aug. 15, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-946650-05-4
Page Count: 155
Publisher: Awesome Quest Mysteries
Review Posted Online: Aug. 9, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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