There’s never a dull moment in the Cornwallis household—nor one not rich with love and laughter. Fans of Binny for Short...
Newly arrived in a small Cornish town, 12-year-old Binny Cornwallis struggles to find her footing as disasters and mysteries pile up inexorably.
Hardly has she had time to get decisively off on the wrong foot on the first day of school and so become victim of a campaign of petty harassment led by classmate Clare, than a destructive gale forces Binny and her family into a hasty temporary move to an isolated cottage. There, one of her little brother’s chickens is snatched (by a rare lynx or, as young James puts it, a “jagular”), and the brusque new landlady turns out to be…Clare’s mom. With masterful comic timing McKay spins a whirl of horrifying yet hilarious admissions, mishaps, tart exchanges, and domestic tempests, as well as profoundly affecting discoveries and epiphanies, around her intense, sensitive, impulsive protagonist. Usually hilarious, that is—along with a poignant subplot, told in flashbacks, about a trio of siblings who summered in the cottage before and during World War I, the author weaves in mutually harrowing encounters between Binny and a rifle-toting neighbor. (Player’s illustrations not seen.)
There’s never a dull moment in the Cornwallis household—nor one not rich with love and laughter. Fans of Binny for Short (2013) will welcome this second chance to look in on the commotion. (Fiction. 11-13)Pub Date: June 16, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4424-8278-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: March 31, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2015
A sly, side-splitting hoot from start to finish.
The dreary prospect of spending a lifetime making caskets instead of wonderful inventions prompts a young orphan to snatch up his little sister and flee. Where? To the circus, of course.
Fortunately or otherwise, John and 6-year-old Page join up with Boz—sometime human cannonball for the seedy Wandering Wayfarers and a “vertically challenged” trickster with a fantastic gift for sowing chaos. Alas, the budding engineer barely has time to settle in to begin work on an experimental circus wagon powered by chicken poop and dubbed (with questionable forethought) the Autopsy. The hot pursuit of malign and indomitable Great-Aunt Beauregard, the Coggins’ only living relative, forces all three to leave the troupe for further flights and misadventures. Teele spins her adventure around a sturdy protagonist whose love for his little sister is matched only by his fierce desire for something better in life for them both and tucks in an outstanding supporting cast featuring several notably strong-minded, independent women (Page, whose glare “would kill spiders dead,” not least among them). Better yet, in Boz she has created a scene-stealing force of nature, a free spirit who’s never happier than when he’s stirring up mischief. A climactic clutch culminating in a magnificently destructive display of fireworks leaves the Coggin sibs well-positioned for bright futures. (Illustrations not seen.)
A sly, side-splitting hoot from start to finish. (Adventure. 11-13)Pub Date: April 12, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-06-234510-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Walden Pond Press/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
From McDonald (Tundra Mouse, 1997, etc.), a haunting, dramatic glimpse of the Bone Keeper, a trickster with special transformational powers. Some say Bone Woman is a ghost; some envision her with three heads that view past, present, and future simultaneously. Most, however, call her the “Skeleton Maker” or “Keeper of Bones.” Chanting, shaking, moaning, and wailing, the Bone Keeper is frenzied as she sorts bones; not until the end of the book are readers told, in murmuring lines of free verse, what the Bone Keeper is creating in her mysterious desert cave. Out of the darkness, a wolf springs to life, leaps from the cave, howling, a symbol of resurrection and proof of life’s cyclical nature. Also keeping readers guessing as to the Bone Keeper’s final creation are Karas’s paintings; they, too, require that the final piece of the puzzle be placed before all are understood. The coloring and textures embody the desert setting in the evening, showing the fearsome cave and sandy shadows that wait to release the mystery of the bones. (Picture book. 5-8)
Pub Date: March 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-7894-2559-9
Page Count: 30
Publisher: DK Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1999
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