Hosler’s sincere excitement in both the pursuit of knowledge and the power of comics makes these bugs eminently memorable.
Entomologist Hosler offers an epic adventure that delivers an astonishing amount of information in its interstices.
Impetuous, baseball-cap–clad Lucy, a rising young beetle researcher, heads the first expedition to leave New Coleopolis since its founding 1,002 years ago, when the god Scarabus annihilated old Coleopolis with a barrage of coconuts. As in any good quest novel, her band is made up of a variety of types: There’s maternal Prof. Bombardier, pun-loving firefly Raef, doughty Hercules beetle Mossy, and crusty Prof. Owen, a Cape stag beetle. New Coleopolis is a beetlecentric theocracy, and Lucy’s expedition poses significant threats to the status quo—which is why very early on, Prof. Owen (who is evil as well as crusty) engineers its abandonment. Lost in the wilderness, Lucy and her companions encounter spiders, birds, bats and an enormous variety of insects—even beetles—that they’ve never heard of. Cool bug facts are presented in infodumps (and further explained in disarmingly personal closing annotations); fortunately, they are so interesting that readers are likely to forgive the contrivance. Hosler’s clean lines sometimes make foliage difficult to distinguish from characters, but he invests his beetles with tremendous personality, and the dialogue never lags. Though the novel’s a trifle overstuffed, the clarity of its theme and appeal of its characters carry the day.
Hosler’s sincere excitement in both the pursuit of knowledge and the power of comics makes these bugs eminently memorable. (illustrated cast of characters) (Graphic fantasy. 10 & up)Pub Date: April 7, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-62672-024-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: First Second
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2015
Whether you came for the lore or the love, perfection.
Broken people, complicated families, magic, and Faerie politics: Black’s back.
After the tumultuous ending to the last volume (marriage, exile, and the seeming collapse of all her plots), Jude finds herself in the human world, which lacks appeal despite a childhood spent longing to go back. The price of her upbringing becomes clear: A human raised in the multihued, multiformed, always capricious Faerie High Court by the man who killed her parents, trained for intrigue and combat, recruited to a spy organization, and ultimately the power behind the coup and the latest High King, Jude no longer understands how to exist happily in a world that isn’t full of magic and danger. A plea from her estranged twin sends her secretly back to Faerie, where things immediately come to a boil with Cardan (king, nemesis, love interest) and all the many political strands Jude has tugged on for the past two volumes. New readers will need to go back to The Cruel Prince (2018) to follow the complexities—political and personal side plots abound—but the legions of established fans will love every minute of this lushly described, tightly plotted trilogy closer. Jude might be traumatized and emotionally unhealthy, but she’s an antihero worth cheering on. There are few physical descriptions of humans and some queer representation.
Whether you came for the lore or the love, perfection. (Fantasy. 14-adult)Pub Date: Nov. 19, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-316-31042-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Aug. 27, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
A high-concept premise that falls short in its execution.
A teenage girl finds herself alone after everyone else in her town mysteriously disappears, leaving her scrambling to figure out how to find them all.
One late summer day, everybody in July Fielding’s town disappears. She is left to piece together what happened, following a series of cryptic signs she finds around town urging her to “GET THEM BACK.” The narrative moves back and forth between July’s present and the events of the summer before, when her relationship with her best friend, cross-country team co-captain Sydney, starts to fracture due to a combination of jealousy over July’s new relationship with a cute boy called Sam and sweet up-and-coming freshman Ella’s threatening to overtake Syd’s status as star of the track team. The team members participate in a ritual in which they jump off a cliff into the rocky waters below at the end of their Friday practice runs. Though Ella is reluctant, Syd pressures her to jump. Short, frenetically paced sections move the story along quickly, and there is much foreshadowing pointing to something terrible that occurred at the end of that summer, which may be the key to July’s current predicament, but there is much misdirection too. Ultimately this is a story without enough setup to make the turn the book takes in the end feel fully developed or earned. All characters read white.
A high-concept premise that falls short in its execution. (Fiction. 14-18)Pub Date: Sept. 19, 2023
ISBN: 9780593327173
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2023
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