Fourteen-year-old Gwendoline Riston is in big trouble. Her startlingly milky skin, ash-white hair and abilities as a healer have the villagers spooked, so when the Great Plague spreads from London to Letchlade in 1665, they blame her, “the pale one,” a witch to be sure. For her own protection, her loving father hides her in a secret attic chamber in St. Giles church while he ventures off in search of his missing adopted son, Gwen’s true love. Days turn to months in the solitary confinement of Gwen’s increasingly fetid prison. Readers will share her horror as she witnesses, through a small window, the plague’s ghastly toll on the villagers below her...and their superstition-driven rage: “ ‘Purge us of the evil one,’ mutters Mistress Bramwell...‘She lurks in the air. I feel it.’ ” Themes of willful ignorance, blind faith, persecution, honor, altruism and love swirl through this tightly knit, genuinely suspenseful and occasionally gruesome novel, whose vivid sense of time and place is only intensified by the formal, elegant cadence of Gwen’s fiercely passionate first-person voice. (author’s note, glossary) (Historical fiction. 11-14)
Pub Date: May 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-59643-337-3
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Roaring Brook Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Laboriously harking back to the pulp juveniles of yestercentury—or at least their melodramatic plotting and uncomplicated values—Bell presents the continued exploits of intrepid teen Nick McIver, boy time traveler. Bound and determined to become a hero “molded in the face of danger,” Nick stages a destructive raid on a Nazi airfield in 1940, then darts back to 1781 to rescue his kidnapped little sister from the clutches of hook-handed pirate Billy Blood in the Caribbean, recover from wounds at Mount Vernon (“What’s wrong wid dat po’ chile?” asks the estate’s Cook, before stitching him up sans anesthetic) then rescuing De Grasse’s French fleet from ambush off Nassau so it can sail north to ensure General Washington’s victory at Yorktown. Laced with old-timey language, wild coincidences, arbitrarily trotted-out bit players from the Marquis de Lafayette and Winston Churchill to the odd strumpet or Indian warrior, lurid murders (“The dying victims’ blood mingled with the juice from hundreds of crates of tomatoes”) and explosions aplenty, this doorstopper sequel to Nick of Time (2008) may have a certain retro appeal to adrenaline junkies. (Fantasy. 11-13)
Pub Date: April 13, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-312-57810-7
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin
Review Posted Online: Jan. 9, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
Though anchored by heartfelt feelings of love and loss, this diaphanous tale is unlikely to engage readers the way Waugh’s more arrestingly premised “Mennyms” series has. Ever since he and his father Patrick moved to the village of Belthorp, Thomas has been telling his best friend Mickey that he arrived in a spaceship. He’s not believed, of course, but it’s true. Looking ahead to the future meeting of their two civilizations, the people of Ormingat gave Thomas a human body and sent him to be an English schoolboy for five years, part of a far larger mission to find out what makes Earthlings tick. His only clear memories being Earthly ones, Thomas is understandably upset when his father suddenly announces that it’s time to go—and barely have they begun their journey to Edinburgh, where the spaceship is concealed, than Patrick mysteriously disappears in a violent traffic accident. Traumatized, Thomas winds up in a hospital: unidentified, unidentifiable, and with an uncertain future. What would have made a fine short story is padded out with extraneous detail and characters, plus a lengthy, pointless side jaunt for Patrick, who survives the accident by reflexively shrinking to ant size, has a few adventures, then shoots up to normal at the first sign of real danger. There is never a glimpse of the aliens’ true form, or of the home planet for which Patrick so longs-nor do Thomas’s mutinous feelings last long enough to develop into an inner crisis. Aimless, patchy, uninspired work from an author who has done much better. (Fiction. 11-13)
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-385-32766-8
Page Count: 244
Publisher: Delacorte
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2000
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