The absence of malign characters or motives keeps the tone light, and the parallels with campaigns on broader stages will be...
Political races can get ugly—particularly when they’re family matters.
Class president Claudia Tapper’s smug expectations of an easy re-election for second semester take a major hit when her slacker twin, Reese, enters the race. Being clueless but better liked than his driven, humorless sib in their moderately diverse Manhattan private school, Reese mounts a serious challenge. In no time the rival campaigns have devolved into hot messes of negative spin, straw polls, secret deals, and (perceived) betrayals, with an added element of chaos introduced by a wacko third-party candidate. As in previous Tapper twin brangles, the narrative is framed as a typescript “oral history” by Claudia with interjections from everyone involved, plus frequent “Clickchat” entries, texts from hacked parental phones, screenshots, posters, snapshots of New York City hangouts, and school newspaper articles. Typically, Claudia turns out to be her own worst enemy, but she redeems herself with a last-minute online manifesto that shows she’s not just in it for ego and some determined fence-mending with alienated friends. Though a post-vote revelation that the election was thrown puts a cynical edge on the whole process, Rodkey’s comical picture of the political arena’s cut and thrust is certainly timely.
The absence of malign characters or motives keeps the tone light, and the parallels with campaigns on broader stages will be obvious to all. (Fiction. 11-13)Pub Date: Sept. 6, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-316-29785-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 31, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2016
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
Readers will really feel blasts of wind, water and flying debris in this disaster tale—at least until the narrative cuts off in mid-howl. As (fictional) Hurricane Emily moves toward Florida and his father, an itinerant contractor specializing in weather-disaster prep and repairs, heads for its expected landfall, Chase takes up temporary residence at a “farm” that turns out to be a circus’ winter quarters. Hardly has he reported to the local school, though, than the storm makes a sudden turn and surge that strands him, along with classmates Nicole and Rashawn, in a wrecked bus on a crumbling levee. Writing in clipped prose and dialogue, Smith quickly plunges the three refugees into a desperate struggle to survive floods, darkness, howling gales and even an encounter with a wily alligator on the way to what they hope will be safety. Though the author’s practice of repeatedly cutting away to other characters’ points of view distracts from rather than tightens the suspense, and he abruptly chops off the narrative on a cliffhanger as the storm’s eye passes, Chase and his friends get repeated opportunities to show that they’re made of sturdy stuff. Since they are left sharing a barn with an elephant who is about to give birth as a vicious escaped leopard roams outside, readers are really going to want to find out what happens next. (Adventure. 11-13)
Pub Date: March 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-545-08175-7
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Scholastic
Review Posted Online: April 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2011
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