A realistic, riveting survival story.
Lost in the woods, feuding sisters confront their deteriorating relationship while trying to survive.
The story opens with 14-year-old Abby, 12-year-old Emma, and 9-year-old Ollie on a disciplinary hike with their camp counselor. When the counselor leaves them to scout the trail, Abby decides to return to camp, with Emma and Ollie reluctantly following. Soon lost, the presumably White sisters flee from a forest fire down to a river, where Emma falls in and is swept away and Ollie vanishes trying to follow her, leaving Abby on her own. In the ensuring hours, Emma nearly drowns, Ollie injures her ankle, and Abby encounters a bear. Their harrowing, sparring, lost-in-the-woods present-day drama alternates with critical backstory from each sister’s perspective. A recent family relocation from California to Utah has left Abby friendless; after joining the cross country team, she abandons Emma. Equally displaced, Emma’s hurt Abby has ditched her, while Ollie pretends to not mind moving but resents being ignored by both her sisters. Their feelings culminate in a series of cruel, humiliating pranks against one another. The artful movement of plot between past and present gradually reveals why they have been sent to camp together. In this story that blends nail-biting adventure with a relationship story, siblings learn through being physically lost and forced to face life-threatening danger that they can discover who they are and what really matters.
A realistic, riveting survival story. (author's note) (Fiction. 9-12)Pub Date: June 7, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-66590-334-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: McElderry
Review Posted Online: April 12, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2022
PERSPECTIVES
Is this the end? Well, no…the series will stagger on through at least one more scheduled sequel.
Sure signs that the creative wells are running dry at last, the Captain’s ninth, overstuffed outing both recycles a villain (see Book 4) and offers trendy anti-bullying wish fulfillment.
Not that there aren’t pranks and envelope-pushing quips aplenty. To start, in an alternate ending to the previous episode, Principal Krupp ends up in prison (“…a lot like being a student at Jerome Horwitz Elementary School, except that the prison had better funding”). There, he witnesses fellow inmate Tippy Tinkletrousers (aka Professor Poopypants) escape in a giant Robo-Suit (later reduced to time-traveling trousers). The villain sets off after George and Harold, who are in juvie (“not much different from our old school…except that they have library books here.”). Cut to five years previous, in a prequel to the whole series. George and Harold link up in kindergarten to reduce a quartet of vicious bullies to giggling insanity with a relentless series of pranks involving shaving cream, spiders, effeminate spoof text messages and friendship bracelets. Pilkey tucks both topical jokes and bathroom humor into the cartoon art, and ups the narrative’s lexical ante with terms like “pharmaceuticals” and “theatrical flair.” Unfortunately, the bullies’ sad fates force Krupp to resign, so he’s not around to save the Earth from being destroyed later on by Talking Toilets and other invaders…
Is this the end? Well, no…the series will stagger on through at least one more scheduled sequel. (Fantasy. 10-12)Pub Date: Aug. 28, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-545-17534-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Scholastic
Review Posted Online: June 19, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2012
During a school year in which a gifted teacher who emphasizes personal responsibility among his fifth graders ends up in a coma from a thrown snowball, his students come to terms with their own issues and learn to be forgiving. Told in short chapters organized month-by-month in the voices of seven students, often describing the same incident from different viewpoints, this weaves together a variety of not-uncommon classroom characters and situations: the new kid, the trickster, the social bully, the super-bright and the disaffected; family clashes, divorce and death; an unwed mother whose long-ago actions haven't been forgotten in the small-town setting; class and experiential differences. Mr. Terupt engineers regular visits to the school’s special-needs classroom, changing some lives on both sides. A "Dollar Word" activity so appeals to Luke that he sprinkles them throughout his narrative all year. Danielle includes her regular prayers, and Anna never stops her hopeful matchmaking. No one is perfect in this feel-good story, but everyone benefits, including sentimentally inclined readers. (Fiction. 9-12)
Pub Date: Oct. 12, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-385-73882-8
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Delacorte
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2010
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