This brightly conceived fantasy debut offers mindful solutions for digital addiction.
In Polman’s YA debut, a group of teens explore identity while on a magical adventure.
Australian high school student Flyn Starman lives with his Gran, the town’s healer. She has a wild garden from which she creates healing herbal mixtures. When Flyn; his best friend, Maisy Monnard; and several other students miss the bus for a school camping trip, two teachers opt to drive them. The students and teachers are in a minibus on a secluded road when, mysteriously, the bus and all gadgets stop working. The group disembarks, and the bus and road vanish. Tree branches begin moving and guiding the frightened troop deeper into the strange wilderness, where they encounter trolls and numerous other fantastic creatures. One important ally is the diminutive Green Man; he explains that they’ve entered the “Forest of All Creatures.” The teens and their teachers soon battle for their souls in a realm of wondrous opportunity and grave danger. Polman’s YA novel, using colorful elements that will entice middle-grade readers, warns young people about the perils of digital addiction via an extended metaphor representing the web. The baby trolls that attack anything in sight parallel trolls online who stir trouble. The Green Man, representing the healing outdoors, gives the teens warmth and light that are drained by screen time along with the lesson, “You cannot blame others or say mean things...without it having an effect on you. You will destroy your own light.” The fantasy ambiance is well established with lines like, “Pale moonlight lit up a narrow path stretching in front of them...dappled with the ghostly shadows of overhanging trees.” In the real world, Flyn’s Gran is calmly sure of his return. An Aboriginal elder named Junnumurra helps in the search. Polman’s message of embracing nature and minimizing technological dependence is laudable for adults, not just teens. The finale hints at a sequel.
This brightly conceived fantasy debut offers mindful solutions for digital addiction.Pub Date: Oct. 27, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-982292-23-2
Page Count: 286
Publisher: BalboaPressAU
Review Posted Online: March 16, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Even when King is not at his best, he’s still good.
Two killers are on the loose. Can they be stopped?
In this ambitious mystery, the prolific and popular King tells the story of a serial murderer who pledges, in a note to Buckeye City police, to kill “13 innocents and 1 guilty,” in order, we eventually learn, to avenge the death of a man who was framed and convicted for possession of child pornography and then killed in prison. At the same time, the author weaves in the efforts of another would-be murderer, a member of a violently abortion-opposing church who has been stalking a popular feminist author and women’s rights activist on a publicity tour. To tell these twin tales of murders done and intended, King summons some familiar characters, including private investigator Holly Gibney, whom readers may recall from previous novels. Gibney is enlisted to help Buckeye City police detective Izzy Jaynes try to identify and stop the serial killer, who has been murdering random unlucky citizens with chilling efficiency. She’s also been hired as a bodyguard for author and activist Kate McKay and her young assistant. The author succeeds in grabbing the reader’s interest and holding it throughout this page-turning tale of terror, which reads like a big-screen thriller. The action is well paced, the settings are vividly drawn, and King’s choice to focus on the real and deadly dangers of extremist thought is admirable. But the book is hamstrung by cliched characters, hackneyed dialogue (both spoken and internal), and motives that feel both convoluted and overly simplistic. King shines brightest when he gets to the heart of our darkest fears and desires, but here the dangers seem a bit cerebral. In his warning letter to the police, the serial killer wonders if his cryptic rationale to murder will make sense to others, concluding, “It does to me, and that is enough.” Is it enough? In another writer’s work, it might not be, but in King’s skilled hands, it probably is.
Even when King is not at his best, he’s still good.Pub Date: May 27, 2025
ISBN: 9781668089330
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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