In the first volume of an epic YA fantasy series, an outcast teen must help avert war between the realms of machinery and magic.
Jonothon Wyer lives in Polari, a town that experiences permanent night as part of Dark End. Its citizens mine blackrock and have outlawed magic, upgrading their own bodies with mechanical implants. Pollution, however, plagues the land, and Jonothon, an outcast, wheels around with a breathing regulator. He even sends Polari into chaos when he’s mistaken for a wizard from Day End (where society knows only sunlight and embraces magic). Excellent grades in school nevertheless make his future seem bright. But before joining the military and receiving implants to fix his breathing, he visits the Shrine of the Seraphim. There, he finds an odd medallion with a gem in its center. Upon returning to Polari, Jonothon learns that the empress—alongside an army of mechanical minions—is visiting from the capital. The boy’s mentor, Aquinas, tells him that she’s after his medallion, which is actually Attrayer’s Key, an artifact of immense power that can reshape the divided world. Jonothon decides to carve out a different future by doing the unthinkable—venturing into Day End. Debut author Grey offers a colorful mashup of sci-fi and fantasy motifs as his hero explores a world full of battle golems, tumnkins (who have fur and horns), griffins and dozens of other characters. Early on, he establishes a humorous tone with Dark End slogans: “Friends Don’t Let Friends Dabble in Magic!” There are also many passages emphasizing the meditative beauty of nature. In the forest, for example, “Time lost its meaning; [Jonothon’s] body felt connected to all the sounds around him.” Occasionally, Grey’s homage to the Lord of the Rings trilogy and the “Final Fantasy” video games makes for cluttered reading. The busy plot tries to mix angels and gods such as Shiva with magic and tech-suits, yet Grey’s central message is laudable, expressed by the Sage of Ages: “What is there to gain in heaven if we lose ourselves along the path to it?”
An imaginative feast for younger readers.
Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: TechTree Publishing
Review Posted Online: July 9, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Readers can still rely on this series to bring laughs.
The Heffley family’s house undergoes a disastrous attempt at home improvement.
When Great Aunt Reba dies, she leaves some money to the family. Greg’s mom calls a family meeting to determine what to do with their share, proposing home improvements and then overruling the family’s cartoonish wish lists and instead pushing for an addition to the kitchen. Before bringing in the construction crew, the Heffleys attempt to do minor maintenance and repairs themselves—during which Greg fails at the work in various slapstick scenes. Once the professionals are brought in, the problems keep getting worse: angry neighbors, terrifying problems in walls, and—most serious—civil permitting issues that put the kibosh on what work’s been done. Left with only enough inheritance to patch and repair the exterior of the house—and with the school’s dismal standardized test scores as a final straw—Greg’s mom steers the family toward moving, opening up house-hunting and house-selling storylines (and devastating loyal Rowley, who doesn’t want to lose his best friend). While Greg’s positive about the move, he’s not completely uncaring about Rowley’s action. (And of course, Greg himself is not as unaffected as he wishes.) The gags include effectively placed callbacks to seemingly incidental events (the “stress lizard” brought in on testing day is particularly funny) and a lampoon of after-school-special–style problem books. Just when it seems that the Heffleys really will move, a new sequence of chaotic trouble and property destruction heralds a return to the status quo. Whew.
Readers can still rely on this series to bring laughs. (Graphic/fiction hybrid. 8-12)Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-4197-3903-3
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Amulet/Abrams
Review Posted Online: Nov. 18, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
Little Blue’s fans will enjoy the animal sounds and counting opportunities, but it’s the sparkling lights on the truck’s own...
The sturdy Little Blue Truck is back for his third adventure, this time delivering Christmas trees to his band of animal pals.
The truck is decked out for the season with a Christmas wreath that suggests a nose between headlights acting as eyeballs. Little Blue loads up with trees at Toad’s Trees, where five trees are marked with numbered tags. These five trees are counted and arithmetically manipulated in various ways throughout the rhyming story as they are dropped off one by one to Little Blue’s friends. The final tree is reserved for the truck’s own use at his garage home, where he is welcomed back by the tree salestoad in a neatly circular fashion. The last tree is already decorated, and Little Blue gets a surprise along with readers, as tiny lights embedded in the illustrations sparkle for a few seconds when the last page is turned. Though it’s a gimmick, it’s a pleasant surprise, and it fits with the retro atmosphere of the snowy country scenes. The short, rhyming text is accented with colored highlights, red for the animal sounds and bright green for the numerical words in the Christmas-tree countdown.
Little Blue’s fans will enjoy the animal sounds and counting opportunities, but it’s the sparkling lights on the truck’s own tree that will put a twinkle in a toddler’s eyes. (Picture book. 2-5)Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-544-32041-3
Page Count: 24
Publisher: HMH Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 11, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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