Funny but flawed, this meandering adventure is an addition to the current crop of not-quite-superhero titles for middle...
James and Smith show how an unassuming boy can save the day: with equal parts heart and oddball jokes.
Murph is a quiet 11-year-old tired of moving from place to place with his chronically underemployed mother. There’s no room in this new town’s public schools for Murph, but a chance encounter with an unusually muscled administrator scores him a spot in a school curiously named The School. Murph soon learns that The School is only for children with Capes, or Capabilities, the modern term for superpowers. He’s allowed to stay on despite his total lack thereof, making friends with other marginalized kids including Nellie, quiet but powerful, and Mary, who flies using an umbrella. Supervillain Nektar is the absurd but menacing result of a lab accident involving wasp DNA; he is aided by his unctuous henchperson. The lengthy (300-plus pages) story is mostly carried by the goofy humor, including direct appeals to readers to shout things like “I AM THE KING OF THE PINEAPPLE PEOPLE” and other absurdist touches. The humor sometimes tips over into mean-spirited, as in the case of the motley cast of bullies depicted as ugly or fat. Brown-skinned Nellie and Asian Billy are two of the very few characters of color as depicted in Salcedo’s illustrations.
Funny but flawed, this meandering adventure is an addition to the current crop of not-quite-superhero titles for middle graders. (Adventure. 8-13)Pub Date: June 19, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-68119-709-8
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: March 17, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A waggish tale with a serious (and timely) theme.
An age-old rivalry is reluctantly put aside when two young vacationers are lost in the wilderness.
Anthropomorphic—in body if definitely not behavior—Dogg Scout Oscar and pampered Molly Hissleton stray from their separate camps, meet by chance in a trackless magic forest, and almost immediately recognize that their only chance of survival, distasteful as the notion may be, lies in calling a truce. Patterson and Grabenstein really work the notion here that cooperation is better than prejudice founded on ignorance and habit, interspersing explicit exchanges on the topic while casting the squabbling pair with complementary abilities that come out as they face challenges ranging from finding food to escaping such predators as a mountain lion and a pack of vicious “weaselboars.” By the time they cross a wide river (on a raft steered by “Old Jim,” an otter whose homespun utterances are generally cribbed from Mark Twain—an uneasy reference) back to civilization, the two are BFFs. But can that friendship survive the return, with all the social and familial pressures to resume the old enmity? A climactic cage-match–style confrontation before a worked-up multispecies audience provides the answer. In the illustrations (not seen in finished form) López plops wide-eyed animal heads atop clothed, more or less human forms and adds dialogue balloons for punchlines.
A waggish tale with a serious (and timely) theme. (Fantasy. 9-11)Pub Date: April 1, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-316-41156-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Jimmy Patterson/Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Dec. 15, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2019
It’s great to see these kids “so enthusiastic about committing high treason.” (historical note) (Historical fiction. 10-12)
Near the end of World War II, two kids join their parents in a plot to kill Adolf Hitler.
Max, 12, lives with his parents and his older sister in a Berlin that’s under constant air bombardment. During one such raid, a mortally wounded man stumbles into the white German family’s home and gasps out his last wish: “The Führer must die.” With this nighttime visitation, Max and Gerta discover their parents have been part of a resistance cell, and the siblings want in. They meet a colorful band of upper-class types who seem almost too whimsical to be serious. Despite her charming levity, Prussian aristocrat and cell leader Frau Becker is grimly aware of the stakes. She enlists Max and Gerta as couriers who sneak forged identification papers to Jews in hiding. Max and Gerta are merely (and realistically) cogs in the adults’ plans, but there’s plenty of room for their own heroism. They escape capture, rescue each other when they’re caught out during an air raid, and willingly put themselves repeatedly at risk to catch a spy. The fictional plotters—based on a mix of several real anti-Hitler resistance cells—are portrayed with a genuine humor, giving them the space to feel alive even in such a slim volume.
It’s great to see these kids “so enthusiastic about committing high treason.” (historical note) (Historical fiction. 10-12)Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-338-35902-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Scholastic
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
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