Airy computer hijinks—with something of a letdown when the secret's out. Yet how could it be otherwise? Kate draws a self-portrait on her doctor-father's computer—titled (for a school assignment) "Self-Portrait of a Computer Nut"—and gets a message from an unidentified someone or something, who on next contact calls himself an extra-terrestrial, BB-9. A hoax? A mysterious admirer? Best-friend Linda's wacky ideas for eliminating suspects shame and embarrass Kate—but secret, overweight crush Willie Lomax (victim of an accidental dousing in flea dip) gets interested nonetheless. BB-9 can also be contacted on Willie's Apple; he seems to be able to read minds; maybe he is for real—and coming to earth imminently, as he says, for firsthand experience "IN EVOKING LAUGHTER." What's more real is Kate's discomfiture: she's down on Linda ("Kate, I can't help being funny"), at odds with her family ("Dr. Morrison sighed"), edgy with Willie—whose self-mocking wit makes him very likable, and hard to perturb. Then Kate and Willie meet BB-9, as arranged, in a burger joint: a quasi-kid, with a mechanical voice, who's already alienated himself by cracking weird extra-terrestrial jokes that no one gets. ("I SAID TO THE WAITRESS, WHAT WEIGHS TWO THOUSAND POUNDS, HAS FOURTEEN LEGS, THREE HEADS, AND GOES ERRRRRRRRP? . . . A CRUSTACEAN MONSTER WITH INDIGESTION.") When he also insists on telling jokes at a nearby pep rally, he's stampeded; Kate and Willie extricate him; and Kate sends him off happy by genuinely laughing at his last joke. The who's-on-the-computer? gambit, and the true-to-character humor holds up well enough to keep readers going—even if the thwarted space-comedian bombs out.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1984
ISBN: 0140320865
Page Count: 158
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: April 18, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1984
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
A charming friendship story and great setup for future books.
Curious about the Big Wide World outside his Sasquatch community, Hugo makes a friend who is of it.
Sasquatch Hugo’s bedroom is inside a cave and possesses the charming feature of a small stream running through it that he can sail his little toy boat on. It’s cool, but he yearns to see the Big Wide World. When he asks his smart friend Gigi if a Sasquatch might become a sailor, she says it’s possible but would be difficult—the primary rule of their people is to not be seen by Humans. Then, in everyone’s favorite Hide and Go Sneak class, which is held outside, a Human appears; Hugo laughs at the sight, drawing Human attention in a taboo-breaking mistake. Shortly after, Hugo’s toy boat floats into the cave with a Human toy—soon, it’s facilitating a pen-pal–type relationship that’s derailed when Hugo confesses to being a Sasquatch and Human Boone, a budding cryptozoologist, doesn’t believe him. How Hugo and Boone resolve this misapprehension and become friends in a joint search for the Ogopogo concludes this series opener. Potter keeps the third-person narrative tightly focused on Hugo’s perspective, and the details she uses to flesh out the Sasquatch world are delightfully playful. Sala’s drawings depict a homey Sasquatch cavern community, Boone as a freckled, white boy, and Hugo as a hairily benevolent behemoth.
A charming friendship story and great setup for future books. (final art unseen) (Fantasy. 5-9)Pub Date: April 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-4197-2859-4
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Amulet/Abrams
Review Posted Online: Dec. 10, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2018
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