Gridiron heroics in space, with spotlights on the personal and collective value of team play.
With ownership of the entire Earth at stake, a seemingly random group of young athletes is tasked with winning an intergalactic football tournament.
Because everyone chosen for the Planet Earth Defenders team is under 14 and none have ever even played football, they've clearly been set up for failure. So, can the squad, led by its terrified and unathletic designated quarterback, Wyatt, figure out how to leverage the various basketball, gymnastics, ballet, arm wrestling, and other skills it does have in time to save the world? Losing 72-6 to the hulking alien Droglidorians in the first game doesn’t inspire confidence; still, throwing out the standard playbook turns out to be a good first step. And, as outrageously brutal, toothy, toxic slime–spitting opponents come and go, the team jells together in time to face the Yextals—the biggest, meanest, most carnivorous foe of all—in the finals. Wyatt turns out to have such an unexpected knack for leadership and, in the crunch, clever improvisational skills that he comes away with a new, well-earned sense of self-confidence. In his narrative and Dorman’s free-wheeling, all-action scenes, the Defenders appear as a notably diverse bunch, both multiracial and, as it includes several immigrants from other planets, multispecies. The large font, ample white space, fast pace, and abundant illustrations will attract reluctant readers.
Gridiron heroics in space, with spotlights on the personal and collective value of team play. (Science fiction. 8-11)Pub Date: Sept. 24, 2024
ISBN: 9780593662304
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Penguin Workshop
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A fizzy mix of low humor and brisk action, with promise of more of both to come.
Heroic deeds await Isaac after his little sister runs into the school basement and is captured by elves.
Even though their school is a spooky old castle transplanted stone by stone from Germany, Isaac and his two friends, Max and Emma, little suspect that an entire magical kingdom lies beneath—a kingdom run by elves, policed by oversized rats in uniform, and populated by captives who start out human but undergo transformative “weirding.” These revelations await Isaac and sidekicks as they nerve themselves to trail his bossy younger sib, Lily, through a shadowy storeroom and into a tunnel, across a wide lake, and into a city lit by half-human fireflies, where they are cast together into a dungeon. Can they escape before they themselves start changing? Gibson pits his doughty rescuers against such adversaries as an elven monarch who emits truly kingly belches and a once-human jailer with a self-picking nose. Tests of mettle range from a riddle contest to a face-off with the menacing head rat Shelfliver, and a helter-skelter chase finally leads rescuers and rescued back to the aboveground. Plainly, though, there is further rescuing to be done.
A fizzy mix of low humor and brisk action, with promise of more of both to come. (Fantasy. 9-11)Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-62370-255-7
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Capstone Young Readers
Review Posted Online: June 28, 2015
This kid-friendly satire ably sets claws into a certain real-life franchise.
A trip to the Love Love Angel Kitty World theme park (“The Most Super Incredibly Happy Place on Earth!”) turns out to be an exercise in lowered expectations…to say the least.
When Uncle Murray wins a pair of free passes it seems at first like a dream come true—at least for Kitty, whose collection of Love Love Kitty merch ranges from branded underwear to a pink chainsaw. But the whole trip turns into a series of crises beginning with the (as it turns out) insuperable challenge of getting a cat onto an airplane, followed by the twin discoveries that the hotel room doesn’t come with a litter box and that the park doesn’t allow cats. Even kindhearted Uncle Murray finds his patience, not to say sanity, tested by extreme sticker shock in the park’s gift shop and repeated exposures to Kitty World’s literally nauseating theme song (notation included). He is not happy. Fortunately, the whole cloying enterprise being a fiendish plot to make people so sick of cats that they’ll pick poultry as favorite pets instead, the revelation of Kitty’s feline identity puts the all-chicken staff to flight and leaves the financial coffers plucked. Uncle Murray’s White, dumpy, middle-aged figure is virtually the only human one among an otherwise all-animal cast in Bruel’s big, rapidly sequenced, and properly comical cartoon panels.
This kid-friendly satire ably sets claws into a certain real-life franchise. (Graphic satire. 8-11)Pub Date: Dec. 29, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-20808-8
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Roaring Brook Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 28, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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