Moving and thoughtful; presents a genuine hero as model while making a strong case that the classics are cool.
Thousands of years after dying in battle, a Greek shade shakes up both the over- and underworlds by escaping Hades’ clutches.
Showing laudable streaks of idealism, the renowned co-authors create a character who makes nearly everyone around him better people. Having refused to drink from the river Lethe on the way into Hades and so keeping most of his memories, Simon of Athens (who was 13 when he died) has spent the last 2,451 years serving Queen Persephone, beguiling the savage guardian Cerberus, and hanging out with the likes of Socrates, Shakespeare, Sartre, and Maya (“who knew something about cages”). Succeeding at last after nearly 90,000 escape attempts, he emerges from a school bathroom stall in present-day St. Paul before the wondering eyes of bullied but resilient seventh grader Zeke Tripp, who remarks, “Dude, you have got to get some clothes on.” Ensuing chortle-worthy events will sweep readers along—as will the infectious, rapturous delight Simon takes in every moment of being once more in the world of the living, where his own heartbeat is a marvel, and so is everything from color to the taste of chocolate cake. So brightly shines his love of life that young audiences will come away as profoundly affected as the characters he encounters both above ground and below. Names cue diversity in the crowds of shades.
Moving and thoughtful; presents a genuine hero as model while making a strong case that the classics are cool. (Fantasy. 11-13)Pub Date: May 5, 2026
ISBN: 9780063380974
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Clarion/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 9, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: today
A sly, side-splitting hoot from start to finish.
The dreary prospect of spending a lifetime making caskets instead of wonderful inventions prompts a young orphan to snatch up his little sister and flee. Where? To the circus, of course.
Fortunately or otherwise, John and 6-year-old Page join up with Boz—sometime human cannonball for the seedy Wandering Wayfarers and a “vertically challenged” trickster with a fantastic gift for sowing chaos. Alas, the budding engineer barely has time to settle in to begin work on an experimental circus wagon powered by chicken poop and dubbed (with questionable forethought) the Autopsy. The hot pursuit of malign and indomitable Great-Aunt Beauregard, the Coggins’ only living relative, forces all three to leave the troupe for further flights and misadventures. Teele spins her adventure around a sturdy protagonist whose love for his little sister is matched only by his fierce desire for something better in life for them both and tucks in an outstanding supporting cast featuring several notably strong-minded, independent women (Page, whose glare “would kill spiders dead,” not least among them). Better yet, in Boz she has created a scene-stealing force of nature, a free spirit who’s never happier than when he’s stirring up mischief. A climactic clutch culminating in a magnificently destructive display of fireworks leaves the Coggin sibs well-positioned for bright futures. (Illustrations not seen.)
A sly, side-splitting hoot from start to finish. (Adventure. 11-13)Pub Date: April 12, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-06-234510-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Walden Pond Press/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
Narrow squeaks aplenty combine with bursts of lyrical prose for a satisfying adventure
A Prohibition-era child enlists a gifted pickpocket and a pair of budding circus performers in a clever ruse to save her ancestral home from being stolen by developers.
Rundell sets her iron-jawed protagonist on a seemingly impossible quest: to break into the ramshackle Hudson River castle from which her grieving grandfather has been abruptly evicted by unscrupulous con man Victor Sorrotore and recover a fabulously valuable hidden emerald. Laying out an elaborate scheme in a notebook that itself turns out to be an integral part of the ensuing caper, Vita, only slowed by a bout with polio years before, enlists a team of helpers. Silk, a light-fingered orphan, aspiring aerialist Samuel Kawadza, and Arkady, a Russian lad with a remarkable affinity for and with animals, all join her in a series of expeditions, mostly nocturnal, through and under Manhattan. The city never comes to life the way the human characters do (Vita, for instance, “had six kinds of smile, and five of them were real”) but often does have a tangible presence, and notwithstanding Vita’s encounter with a (rather anachronistically styled) “Latina” librarian, period attitudes toward race and class are convincingly drawn. Vita, Silk, and Arkady all present white; Samuel, a Shona immigrant from Southern Rhodesia, is the only primary character of color. Santoso’s vignettes of, mostly, animals and small items add occasional visual grace notes.
Narrow squeaks aplenty combine with bursts of lyrical prose for a satisfying adventure . (Historical fiction. 11-13)Pub Date: Aug. 27, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-4814-1948-2
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 25, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2019
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