This volume is sure to find an audience.
This collection of fairy tales from around the world positions girl characters as adventurers.
Nearly every continent is represented here, with stories from Scotland, Spain, Sweden, Nigeria, Lesotho, Iran, Siberia, China, India, Russia, Japan, the Iroquois Nation, and more. Each story is three or four pages long, printed on paper of various attractive colors, with illustrations adorning some text-heavy pages and full-page or double-page–spread illustrations interspersed with others. The main characters are girls who face challenges from natural disasters, from families forcing them into marriages, from supernatural beings that threaten their families, villages, and kingdoms. For various reasons, they go out to save their husbands, to prove their bravery and skill, to escape, or to protect their homes. Like most fairy tales, these stories contain the inexplicable and the limited, such as a young woman who slays a dragon in order to provide her brothers with the fine clothing they demand. Still, compared to the traditional formula of a damsel in distress who is rescued, married, and lives happily ever after, these offer a welcome disruption. The girls and women are clever, courageous, and active, and they shape their own stories, if within the confines of their situations. The pictures add an engaging rest for the eyes, though the illustration of the Chinese characters suffers from racist overtones in the depiction of closed, slanted eyes.
This volume is sure to find an audience. (background, talking points, index) (Fairy tales. 5-10)Pub Date: Sept. 7, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-68010-256-7
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Tiger Tales
Review Posted Online: July 26, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2021
Dizzyingly silly.
The famous superhero returns to fight another villain with all the trademark wit and humor the series is known for.
Despite the title, Captain Underpants is bizarrely absent from most of this adventure. His school-age companions, George and Harold, maintain most of the spotlight. The creative chums fool around with time travel and several wacky inventions before coming upon the evil Turbo Toilet 2000, making its return for vengeance after sitting out a few of the previous books. When the good Captain shows up to save the day, he brings with him dynamic action and wordplay that meet the series’ standards. The Captain Underpants saga maintains its charm even into this, the 11th volume. The epic is filled to the brim with sight gags, toilet humor, flip-o-ramas and anarchic glee. Holding all this nonsense together is the author’s good-natured sense of harmless fun. The humor is never gross or over-the-top, just loud and innocuous. Adults may roll their eyes here and there, but youngsters will eat this up just as quickly as they devoured every other Underpants episode.
Dizzyingly silly. (Humor. 8-10)Pub Date: Aug. 26, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-545-50490-4
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Scholastic
Review Posted Online: June 3, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
As Captain Awesome would say, this kid is “MI-TEE!” (Fiction. 5-8)
The town of Sunnyview got a little bit safer when 8-year-old Eugene McGillicudy moved in.
Just like his comic-book mentor, Super Dude, Eugene, aka Captain Awesome, is on a one-man mission is to save the world from supervillains, like the nefarious “Queen Stinkypants from Planet Baby.” Just as Eugene suspected, plenty of new supervillains await him at Sunnyview Elementary. Are Meredith Mooney and the mind-reading Ms. Beasley secretly working together to try and force Eugene to reveal his secret identity? Will Principal Brick Foot succeed in throwing Captain Awesome into the “Dungeon of Detention?” Fortunately, Eugene isn’t forced to go it alone. Charlie Thomas Jones, fellow comic-book lover and Super Dude fan, stands ready and willing to help. When the class hamster goes missing, Captain Awesome must don his cape and, with the help of his new best friend, ride to the rescue. Kirby’s funny and engaging third-person narration and O’Connor’s hilarious illustrations make the book easily accessible and enormously appealing, particularly to readers who have recently graduated to chapter books. But it is the quirky, mischievous Eugene that really makes this book special. His energy and humor are contagious, and his dogged commitment to his superhero alter ego is enough to make anyone a believer.
As Captain Awesome would say, this kid is “MI-TEE!” (Fiction. 5-8)Pub Date: April 3, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4424-4090-6
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Little Simon/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Jan. 17, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
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