A 13-year-old klutz earns entry to an airborne Academy for young superheroes, and proves her mettle when students and faculty from a rival institution attack the school for supervillains. Sound familiar? It should; the 2005 film Sky High shares the same premise, and Zoom, a 2006 Tim Allen vehicle currently in production, was adapted from Lethcoe’s comic book, which he improves upon here with some clever touches. The heroes all wear self-designed outfits (illustrated in the author’s occasional small pencil drawings), bear evocative names like “Beetlebomb” (good, though gross—he can blow himself up), or “Lucifina” (evil), and while taking classes in fighting dirty and creating melodramatic music, the villains-in-training wonder why it is that Good usually prevails. Young Summer, the low-self-esteem protagonist, turns out to have the vanishingly rare ability to enhance the superpowers of others and by saving Zoom’s Academy for the Super Gifted, she earns the ultimate reward: a comic of her own. Not exactly groundbreaking, but above average as media tie-ins go. (Fantasy. 10-12)
Pub Date: Oct. 25, 2005
ISBN: 0-345-48355-3
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Nothing spices up a boring road trip like moments of extreme terror.
Twins Coke and Pepsi McDonald squeak through numerous murder attempts at roadside attractions across the Midwest and on eastward.
After berating readers who skipped the opener, Mission Unstoppable (2011), Gutman picks up his unconventional cross-country travelogue where he left off. He takes the RV holding his 13-year-old brainiacs and their oblivious parents from the National Mustard Museum in Spring Green, Wisc., to the National Museum of American History in Washington D.C. Along the way, he pauses to suspend the sibs in French-fry cages over boiling oil outside the first McDonald’s, imprison them in glass vats of soft-serve ice cream at Ohio’s spectacular Cedar Point Amusement Park, lock them inside Cleveland’s Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Museum (with a Megadeth track cranked up to mind-blowing level) and subject them to other perils. What’s up? It seems aptly named bad guy Archie Clone and other assassins are out to kill, or perhaps test, them before they can join a secret organization of child geniuses and collect a huge reward. Tucking in small photos, instructions for following the route on Google Maps, facts about attractions large and small and mysterious ciphered messages, the author brings his confused but resourceful youngsters to an explosive climax and a shocking revelation that guarantees further adventures on the road back to the left coast.
Nothing spices up a boring road trip like moments of extreme terror. (Adventure. 10-12)Pub Date: Jan. 24, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-06-182767-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Oct. 11, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Robert Linnly and Elizabeth Mawes, the boy and girl runaways aided by orphan Peter York in Night Journeys (1979), continue their flight in this crisp chronicle, which is presented as testimony by a number of those involved in the story. (Avi whets curiosity by plunging straight into the testimony, without indicating what exactly is being investigated in the 1768 hearing.) Among those whose alternating statements take up and carry on the story are John Tolivar of Trenton, to whom the runaways are bonded as indentured servants; Nathaniel Hill, a sleazy adventurer, paid to retrieve Elizabeth (he’s been told that the boy has been captured, but doesn’t know that Robert has escaped); Robert himself, describing the flight and his growing concern for Elizabeth (Bet) when she becomes ill from an infected arm wound; and George Clagget, the constable at Easton, whom Hill enlists to fetch the girl when he learns that she is being cared for in the nearby cave of old Mad Moll. Moll herself was once a girl of good family, but was rejected by parents and fiancé when she was raped by a soldier. For a time, as Bet lies ill in the cave, Robert works as a servant boy to Hill. Gradually, each comes to suspect the other’s identity. There is a final, fast-action confrontation in Mad Moll’s cave, and before it is over Elizabeth is dead. The story’s pace is brisk and Avi’s testimonial format gives a clean, unsentimental tone to the sentimental-melodrama content. It also tends to perpetuate the problem with Night Journeys – namely, the absence of any personal observation, feeling, or quality that would not show up in the well-edited court records. 10-12
Pub Date: April 1, 1980
ISBN: 0380732416
Page Count: 148
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Oct. 27, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1980
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