The adolescent heroes of City of the Beasts are off for another journey with primitive peoples and spectacular creatures in this clunky sequel. Alexander and his Brazilian friend, Nadia, join Alexander’s grandmother Kate on an International Geographic journalistic expedition to the Himalayas. On their visit to the Forbidden Kingdom, they hope to see the mysterious Golden Dragon, an ancient artifact with prophetic powers. Unbeknownst to the adventurers, wicked agents of the second richest man in the world are also on their way to the Forbidden Kingdom, hoping to steal the Golden Dragon and its secret. With the telepathically communicated help of Prince Dil Bahadur, the ascetic teen heir to the throne, Nadia and Alexander must save the day. Bestial Yetis and Buddhist monks work alongside the animal totems Nadia and Alexander discovered in their prior enterprise. The legally enforced primitivism of the People of the Dragon is ultimately and incongruously preserved by Alexander’s knowledge of 21st-century technology. Awkward and overly expository prose makes this otherwise promising offering waver between magical adventure and social-studies lesson. (Fiction. 13-15)
Pub Date: May 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-06-058942-6
Page Count: 448
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2004
Namioka (Den of the White Fox, 1997, etc.) offers readers a glimpse of the ritual of foot-binding, and a surprising heroine whose life is determined by her rejection of that ritual. Ailin is spirited—her family thinks uncontrollable—even at age five, in her family’s compound in China in 1911, she doesn’t want to have her feet bound, especially after Second Sister shows Ailin her own bound feet and tells her how much it hurts. Ailin can see already how bound feet will restrict her movements, and prevent her from running and playing. Her father takes the revolutionary step of permitting her to leave her feet alone, even though the family of Ailin’s betrothed then breaks off the engagement. Ailin goes to the missionary school and learns English; when her father dies and her uncle cuts off funds for tuition, she leaves her family to become a nanny for an American missionary couple’s children. She learns all the daily household chores that were done by servants in her own home, and finds herself, painfully, cut off from her own culture and separate from the Americans. At 16, she decides to go with the missionaries when they return to San Francisco, where she meets and marries another Chinese immigrant who starts his own restaurant. The metaphor of things bound and unbound is a ribbon winding through this vivid narrative; the story moves swiftly, while Ailin is a brave and engaging heroine whose difficult choices reflect her time and her gender. (Fiction. 9-14)
Pub Date: May 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-385-32666-1
Page Count: 154
Publisher: Delacorte
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1999
For a girl who is—by most standards—not perceived to be extraordinary, it is not easy living with a family of beautiful people. Jennifer Thayer both envies and resents her gourmet restaurateur/salad-dressing entrepreneur father, her industrial- psychologist mother who seems to care more about her work than about her younger daughter, and especially older sister Cass: lovely, talented, brainy, and preparing for marriage. Desperate for attention, Jennifer fakes an attempted rape, and at first, it works; for once in her life she is at center stage. Soon, however, the detective on the case figures out that something in the girl’s story isn’t right, and suspects that Jennifer’s mother has been abusing her. Caught up in the net of lies, Jennifer has to decide whether or not she can live with a growing sense of shame and guilt. Once again, Cadnum (Heat, 1998, etc.) has dissected the mind of one of society’s troubled young people, who has everything on the surface but is desperately trying to fill an unnamed emptiness. Deep, dark, and moving, this is a model tale of adolescent uneasiness set amid the roiling emotions of modern life. (Fiction. 12-14)
Pub Date: June 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-670-88377-8
Page Count: 167
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1999
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