Dinosaurs break out of their terrarium confines, taking two brothers for a wild ride, in this junior Jurassic Park from Griffith (Dream Meadow, 1994, etc.). Every kid’s dinosaur daydream becomes reality when 12-year-old Nathan tosses younger brother Ryan’s fossilized egg across the room, where it lands in the center of Ryan’s terrarium. As mist envelops the bedroom, desks and chairs recede and carpets become squishy; the boys find themselves lost in a larger-than-life swampy, volcanic habitat, whose rollicking, rampaging residents are giant dinosaurs and insects. Nathan and Ryan easily accept their situation in the face of immediate danger from an ornery coelophysis, a reptilian home-wrecker who steals a mother hadrosaur’s nest eggs; each brief, subsequent episode introduces a new dinosaur, anticipated by Ryan, who knows the attributes of the plastic creatures from his terrarium. Despite a repetitive plot, Griffith competently varies the action and description of the boys’ alternating thrill and terror in the face of such creatures as a “gigantic, glittering carnivore,” or the threat of a lava-spewing volcano. Some irksome banter between the brothers—Nathan constantly muddling dinosaur names with Ryan just as regularly correcting him—doesn’t detract from the screeches, wails, and shrieks that will certainly entice newly independent readers into the pages. (b&w illustrations, not seen) (Fiction. 8-11)
Pub Date: April 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-688-15324-0
Page Count: 97
Publisher: Greenwillow Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1998
However the compelling fitness of theme and event and the apt but unexpected imagery (the opening sentences compare the...
At a time when death has become an acceptable, even voguish subject in children's fiction, Natalie Babbitt comes through with a stylistic gem about living forever.
Protected Winnie, the ten-year-old heroine, is not immortal, but when she comes upon young Jesse Tuck drinking from a secret spring in her parents' woods, she finds herself involved with a family who, having innocently drunk the same water some 87 years earlier, haven't aged a moment since. Though the mood is delicate, there is no lack of action, with the Tucks (previously suspected of witchcraft) now pursued for kidnapping Winnie; Mae Tuck, the middle aged mother, striking and killing a stranger who is onto their secret and would sell the water; and Winnie taking Mae's place in prison so that the Tucks can get away before she is hanged from the neck until....? Though Babbitt makes the family a sad one, most of their reasons for discontent are circumstantial and there isn't a great deal of wisdom to be gleaned from their fate or Winnie's decision not to share it.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1975
ISBN: 0312369816
Page Count: 164
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: April 13, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1975
A kid adventurer with a disability makes this steampunk offering stand out.
Orphaned twins, an adventurer dad lost to an ice monster, and an airship race around the world.
In Lontown, 12-year-old twins Arthur and Maudie learn that their explorer father has gone missing on his quest to reach South Polaris, the crew of his sky-ship apparently eaten by monsters. As he’s accused of sabotage, their father’s property is forfeit. The disgraced twins are sent off to live in a garret in a scene straight out of an Edwardian novel à la A Little Princess. Maudie has the consolation of her engineering skills, but all Arthur wants is to be an adventurer like his father. A chance to join Harriet Culpepper’s journey to South Polaris might offer excitement and let him clear his father’s name—if only he can avoid getting eaten by intelligent ice monsters. Though some steampunk set dressing is appropriately over-the-top (such as a flying house, thinly depicted but charming), adaptive tools for Arthur’s disability are wonderfully realistic. His iron arm is a standard, sometimes painful passive prosthesis. The crew adapts the airship galley for Arthur’s needs, even creating a spiked chopping board. Off the ship, Arthur and Maudie meet people and animals in vignettes that are appealingly rendered but slight. Harriet teaches the white twins respect for the cultures they encounter on these travels, though they are never more than observers of non-Lontowners’ different ways.
A kid adventurer with a disability makes this steampunk offering stand out. (Steampunk. 9-11)Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-324-00564-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Norton Young Readers
Review Posted Online: Dec. 7, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
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