A fantasy series installment that effortlessly informs as it entertains.
Stevens’ (Dragon Lad: The Thirteenth Egg, 2015) middle-grade fantasy sequel finds young Dirk searching for the truth about his past.
In Roman-ruled Britannia, Dirk looks like an average 12-year-old boy, but he actually hatched from a dragon’s egg just seven months ago. Leaving behind his friend, Galinda, on the island of Codhaven, Dirk is searching the lonely, mist-ridden lands for the home of Beldor, High Wizard of the West. At the wizard’s cave, he encounters Ydda, once a “grandmotherly female dragon” and now a human woman, as well as Beldor, who’s merged his consciousness with the dragon Fearclaw’s, with whom he shares a human body. Dirk reveals to them a blue stone talisman that may once have belonged to Gruffen, the Red Dragon of Greenwild. When the boy learns that Gruffen guards a horde of riches, he thinks that acquiring some of it will help him win the acceptance of Galinda’s family. Dirk also thinks that the old dragon may have information about his parents. To outfit this quest, Fearclaw provides the boy with a magical map and a ring that allows him to change between human and dragon forms. As Dirk heads north, he inadvertently loses the ring in the sea while in dragon form. Can he retrieve it and become human again before reaching the town of Isca, where humans may try to kill him? In this rollicking sequel, Stevens combines elements of real-life English history with a shape-shifting–oriented adventure for middle-grade readers. For example, Dirk witnesses the brutality of slavery as Roman soldiers lash Briton workers, but he also teams up with fanciful people such as Leonis, a sea lion who transforms into a human sea captain. Stevens often crafts casually amusing moments, as when Ethelda, the evil woman who raised Dirk, seemingly can’t remember his given name. The protagonist’s dreams and visions frequently guide the plot, which sometimes feels a bit heavy-handed. Still, Stevens’ warm black-and-white illustrations bolster important scenes, as when Dirk meets a mermaid, although truly surreal moments, such as one creature’s transformation from a fly to a dog, remain for audiences to imagine. A joyous ending leaves the cast on a fine footing for the next installment.
A fantasy series installment that effortlessly informs as it entertains.Pub Date: Oct. 29, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-9963839-3-6
Page Count: 242
Publisher: Dragon's Egg Books
Review Posted Online: Sept. 25, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
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