Fresh and original.
Twelve-year-old Ember tries to save ice dragons and learns her own strength along the way.
Infant fire dragon Ember is discovered in Wales by Lionel St. George, a brilliant but error-prone Stormancer and Magician, near the bodies of her slain, fire-dragon parents, hunted down for their valuable scales. To protect her, Lionel casts a spell to disguise Ember as a human child, and she grows up at Chesterfield University, where Lionel teaches. In human form, Ember has the fire dragon’s ability to create fire, but she can’t control it. Distraught after she burns Lionel’s office, Ember decides to live in Antarctica at the research station Lionel’s sister runs. Fawcett’s story starts out slowly, with a tad too much explanation, but the plot picks up intriguingly as Ember, homesick in Antarctica, is befriended by Nisha, the child of one of the station’s scientists, and the mysterious orphan Moss. When Ember learns that there is to be a Winterglass Hunt to kill ice dragons for their scales, she is horrified and determines to sabotage it. Neatly sidestepping tropes and templates, Fawcett’s story is full of original details that add depth to the fairly straightforward plot (Montgomery, the enchanted, cantankerous doorknob, is a hoot). But it is the richly nuanced primary and secondary characters, as well as the evenhanded inclusion of females as intelligent scientists, that give the story its richness. The cast is racially varied; Ember, her adoptive family, and Moss read as white while Nisha has brown skin.
Fresh and original. (Fantasy. 9-12)Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-06-285451-3
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Balzer + Bray/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A lighter-than-air blend of knightly exploits and rib-tickling twists.
Princess Grace of Merryland needs rescuing again, forcing two young knights-in-training to face a series of challenges, from hungry cave sharks to a minotaur named Chad.
Actually, Princess Grace is perfectly capable of rescuing herself—again: see Once Upon a Tim (2022)—except that this time, kidnappers have stashed her in a room that’s locked and bolted on the outside…and in the middle of a maze billed, supposedly, as “the most complex and dastardly labyrinth in the world.” So it is that former peasants Tim and his more capable friend Bull—otherwise known as Belinda when she’s not disguised as a boy—plunge into a mess of dark and bewildering tunnels, armed with a ball of twine provided by the surprisingly sapient village idiot Ferkle, to face a series of deadly threats…though the most legendary of all turns out to be an amiable monster with the body of a bull and the head of, well, a dude. Throughout Gibbs’ lighthearted, laugh-out-loud tale, Curtis supplies proper notes of farce or stark terror as appropriate in flurries of line drawings that present most of the humans and the monsters with human features as White, though Belinda appears to present as Black. Along the way, Tim adds educational value to his narrative by flagging and then pausing to define vocabulary-building words like laborious and vexing.
A lighter-than-air blend of knightly exploits and rib-tickling twists. (Fantasy. 10-12)Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-5344-9928-7
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: July 12, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An entertaining continuation to a magical series that celebrates diversity with a magical twist.
With Rumpelstiltskin and his band of villains still on the loose, the students and staff of Fairy Tale Reform School are on high alert as they prepare for the next attack.
Classes are devoted to teaching battle techniques and conjuring new weapons, which narrator Gilly finds preferable to learning history or manners. But Maxine, her ogress friend, has had it with all the doom and gloom. The last straw is when the agenda at the Royal Lady-in-Waiting meeting is changed from “How to Plan the Perfect Fairy Garden Party” to designing flying rocks and creating flower darts. While on a class field trip to the village to investigate their future careers, Maxine finds a magic lamp housing a genie named Darlene. Her wish that everyone be happy works a little too well. War preparations are put on hold as the school fills with flowers, laughter, and plans for a musical production. But when Gilly is tapped to fill in for the local chief of the dwarf police, things really take a turn for the worse. The students, including fairies, ogres, and the part-human/part-beast offspring of Beauty and the ex-Beast, focus on friendship and supporting one another in spite of their differences. Humility, forgiveness, and loyalty are also highly regarded in the FTRS community. Human Gilly is white, but there is racial as well as species diversity at FTRS.
An entertaining continuation to a magical series that celebrates diversity with a magical twist. (Fantasy. 10-12)Pub Date: March 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-4926-5167-3
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Sourcebooks Jabberwocky
Review Posted Online: Nov. 20, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2018
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