Despite striking landscape illustrations, feels like an undeveloped setting for an RPG.
Child elder Mia longs to know what lies beyond her tribe’s village, but the ill-fated arrival of a mysterious stranger leads her to discover wonders and terrors beyond her wildest imaginings.
As the only child in her generation, Mia’s fate is predetermined. The beauty and love cradling her aren’t enough to relieve the burden of expectations. One night, she wishes for adventure. Instead, a terrible storm arrives, and the land and people begin to sicken. Mia must venture “beyond the walls” in search of the Great Spirit—and what she finds upends everything she’s ever been taught. Ruedisueli’s illustrations contain fantastical, soft-edged, jewel-toned landscapes; pagoda-like structures; and brown-skinned human characters with face paint and vaguely Asiatic garb. The art depicts a rich, vast, yet strangely static world of bygone splendor, wilderness, and creatures nothing like the terrible monsters Mia has been told to fear. The physical journey feels contrived, almost aimless: a way to get a character, any character, out to explore the world, rather than a fully rounded story. The sparse narration is hauntingly lyrical at times but more often hides behind generic cliches that tend, frustratingly, to obscure Mia’s emotional journey as she doubts and thinks and fears in circles around big questions and feelings without ever really reaching the heart of them. The tiny white sans serif typeface outlined in black is difficult to read and detracts from the overall appearance.
Despite striking landscape illustrations, feels like an undeveloped setting for an RPG. (Graphic fantasy. 10-12)Pub Date: May 5, 2026
ISBN: 9781803417479
Page Count: 168
Publisher: Our Street Books
Review Posted Online: May 18, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2026
Wholesome shading to bland, but well-stocked with exotic creatures and locales, plus an agreeable cast headed by a child...
A San Diego preteen learns that she’s an elf, with a place in magic school if she moves to the elves’ hidden realm.
Having felt like an outsider since a knock on the head at age 5 left her able to read minds, Sophie is thrilled when hunky teen stranger Fitz convinces her that she’s not human at all and transports her to the land of Lumenaria, where the ageless elves live. Taken in by a loving couple who run a sanctuary for extinct and mythical animals, Sophie quickly gathers friends and rivals at Foxfire, a distinctly Hogwarts-style school. She also uncovers both clues to her mysterious origins and hints that a rash of strangely hard-to-quench wildfires back on Earth are signs of some dark scheme at work. Though Messenger introduces several characters with inner conflicts and ambiguous agendas, Sophie herself is more simply drawn as a smart, radiant newcomer who unwillingly becomes the center of attention while developing what turn out to be uncommonly powerful magical abilities—reminiscent of the younger Harry Potter, though lacking that streak of mischievousness that rescues Harry from seeming a little too perfect. The author puts her through a kidnapping and several close brushes with death before leaving her poised, amid hints of a higher destiny and still-anonymous enemies, for sequels.
Wholesome shading to bland, but well-stocked with exotic creatures and locales, plus an agreeable cast headed by a child who, while overly fond of screaming, rises to every challenge. (Fantasy. 10-12)Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4424-4593-2
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Aladdin
Review Posted Online: July 17, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2012
Less charming than the opener but does feature a thimbleful of moral quandary at its center.
Armed only with her magical sewing needle, foundling mouse Delphine sets out to confront the cruel rat king in this duology closer.
As vicious rat armies pillage the mouse realms in search of her and her pointy, long-hidden treasure, Delphine finds herself waging an inner war that parallels the outer one. According to dusty documents and other reputable sources, the needle’s good powers can be perverted, but she sees no other way except killing to stop evil rat King Midnight. While struggling with a grim determination to go over to the dark side that sets her at odds with her own fundamentally loving nature, Delphine threads her way along with loyal allies past various scrapes—only to come, climactically, face to face with not only her nemesis, but her own past. Moon stitches in flashbacks to fill out the details of a tragic old love triangle that reaches its fruition here and sews her tale up with a return to Château Desjardins just in time for Cinderella’s wedding and a celebratory rodentine ball in the chandelier overhead, and she leaves a fringe of epilogue hinting at further installments to come.
Less charming than the opener but does feature a thimbleful of moral quandary at its center. (secret codes) (Animal fantasy. 10-12)Pub Date: March 1, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-368-04833-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Disney-Hyperion
Review Posted Online: Dec. 6, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2021
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