For fans of Fforde and the first installment.
Fforde’s signature quirky humor and tongue-in-cheek social commentary persist in the second book of The Chronicles of Kazam trilogy (The Last Dragonslayer, 2012).
Foundling Jennifer Strange runs Kazam, a business that finds practical uses for the Ununited Kingdom’s dwindling magic—delivering pizza by magic carpet, unclogging drains—while awaiting the return of real magic. Kazam’s competition, Industrial Magic, wants a monopoly on magic, with plans to use it for financial gain. A contest will decide the future of magic: Whichever company is faster in repairing Hereford’s medieval bridge will control all magic. The story is rife with magic spells, often humorously botched, and wonderfully imagined characters—including a new love interest for Jennifer. Fforde’s clever wordplay and social satire poke fun at everything from corporations and the monarchy to talentless boy bands and T-shirt slogans. But this impedes the episodic plot and raises the question of audience for the book, as many allusions and puns may elude American teens. Jennifer, likable in her lack of magical powers, seems older than her 16 years; her delivery of dialogue often sounds as though she is reading aloud. The storyline is less strong than that of the first book, making this seem a setup for the final installment. Indeed, the titular Quarkbeast barely makes an appearance.
For fans of Fforde and the first installment. (Fantasy. 12 & up)Pub Date: Sept. 3, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-547-73848-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Sensitive subject matter that could have benefited from a subtler, more sober touch.
A Jewish girl joins up with Polish resistance groups to fight for her people against the evils of the Holocaust.
Chaya Lindner is forcibly separated from her family when they are consigned to the Jewish ghetto in Krakow. The 16-year-old is taken in by the leaders of Akiva, a fledgling Jewish resistance group that offers her the opportunity to become a courier, using her fair coloring to pass for Polish and sneak into ghettos to smuggle in supplies and information. Chaya’s missions quickly become more dangerous, taking her on a perilous journey from a disastrous mission in Krakow to the ghastly ghetto of Lodz and eventually to Warsaw to aid the Jews there in their gathering uprising inside the walls of the ghetto. Through it all, she is partnered with a secretive young girl whom she is reluctant to trust. The trajectory of the narrative skews toward the sensational, highlighting moments of resistance via cinematic action sequences but not pausing to linger on the emotional toll of the Holocaust’s atrocities. Younger readers without sufficient historical knowledge may not appreciate the gravity of the events depicted. The principal characters lack depth, and their actions and the situations they find themselves in often require too much suspension of disbelief to pass for realism.
Sensitive subject matter that could have benefited from a subtler, more sober touch. (afterword) (Historical fiction. 12-16)Pub Date: Aug. 28, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-338-14847-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Scholastic
Review Posted Online: May 27, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2018
A solid genre outing.
In the near future, an incarcerated teen with a reputation for escape attempts is moved to a new, maximum-security facility called the Rig, an oil-drilling platform in the middle of the Arctic Ocean, now converted to use as a prison.
Fifteen-year-old William Drake is a likable, tough-talking narrator who hails from London, the son of an African-American father and a Polish mother. True to hard-boiled type, Drake keeps to himself and resists making friends, even as he makes enemies of the worst baddies by defending weaker kids from them and is won over by the Rig's kindly psychologist, Dr. Lambros. Flavoring the third-person narration with some great one-liners (“She had the voice of a lifelong smoker thrown in a blender”), Ducie takes his time setting the stage for the action-packed second half of the novel, with Drake carefully plotting an escape that involves the skills of his hacker cellmate, Tristan, and the knowledge of Irene, a fellow prisoner who hints at a conspiracy that eventually blows up in their faces. All the elements of a great thriller are here—sinister villains, a stoic hero with a heart of gold, even mutated sharks. If some of these details seem a bit familiar to seasoned action-adventure fans, there is still plenty to keep them engaged, and the open-ended conclusion suggests there may be more to come.
A solid genre outing. (Thriller. 13-18)Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-544-50311-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: HMH Books
Review Posted Online: July 14, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2015
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