A fun and fast-moving adventure giddy with ideas.
This debut middle-grade fantasy sees a neglected orphan returning to the magical kingdom of her birth to face a rising evil.
Thirteen-year-old Caley Cross is the oldest child at the Gunch Home for Wayward Waifs, where she is worked like a slave and kept starved and impoverished. Caley gets on with her life as best she can, but if ever her anger is roused, she dies. Her deaths are only temporary—she revives shortly afterward—but they are linked to an innate power that causes dead animals to come alive. One day, Caley’s resurrections bring her to the attention of a metal-winged crow, whereupon she is rescued from the orphanage and taken to Erinath, a realm beyond Earth. Caley, it transpires, is the lost daughter of Queen Catherine, who disappeared shortly after the girl was born and is thought to have been killed by the nefarious Olpheist. Returned to Castle Erinath (which grows like a tree and often shifts its rooms about), Caley must adjust to her royal status—and to the relentless enmity of Ithica Blight, the vain and petty princess she’s supplanted as next in line to the throne. Ithica’s cruelties aside, there is trouble brewing in the kingdom. Castle Erinath is sickening and Olpheist is rumored to have broken free of his prison. Can Caley and her new friends sort truth from lies and keep him from laying hands on the Hadeon Drop, the ultimate source of creation and destruction? In this wildly imaginative series opener, Rosen’s storytelling overflows with creative fancy, so much so that the strong Harry Potter resonances (cruelly treated chosen one, boarding school social dynamic, Quidditch-like Equidium teams) become an unfortunate distraction from the boundless parade of whimsical characters and fantastical new material. Caley’s adventure begins in a breathless rush before settling down and building steadily to a somewhat abrupt end (and the promise of a sequel). The author’s prose is easy to read, with clear descriptions, age-appropriate dialogue, and plenty of humor. While Ithica is over-the-top and Caley and Olpheist are little distinguished from default heroes and villains, all the other characters ooze originality. All told, young readers will thrill at the sparkle of enchantment.
A fun and fast-moving adventure giddy with ideas.Pub Date: Sept. 8, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-68463-053-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: SparkPress
Review Posted Online: Aug. 7, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A reasonably comprehensive handbook, though it’s confined to classical low- to no-tech methods.
Simple directions for using codes, ciphers, and steganography to send secret messages to friends or fellow spies.
After opening with an overview of historical cryptography from the “Caesar cipher” and an ancient Chinese script called Nushu (used exclusively by women) to the Enigma machine and other World War II–era coding devices, Hunt proceeds to describe over two dozen ways to hide or disguise messages. Along with substitution codes, letter and number grids, anagrams, a tic-tac-toe cipher, a Vigenère table, and like techniques, she provides recipes for invisible ink, instructions for creating paper decoder bracelets or rings, and templates to copy for an Alberti cipher wheel. Most of the illustrations are charts or simple line drawings, with a sprinkling of human figures (all seem to be white). The author adds frequent practice pages with blank lines and short secret messages to decode, and she closes with a series of longer puzzles (answer key included) in a final “Cryptographic Challenge.” But young would-be coders hoping to find more than passing nods to computer programs or cellphone tools—or even that much about modern advances in cryptography—will be disappointed.
A reasonably comprehensive handbook, though it’s confined to classical low- to no-tech methods. (sources) (Nonfiction. 10-12)Pub Date: July 25, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-60286-339-2
Page Count: 112
Publisher: Weinstein Books
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2017
A warm coming-of-age story populated with a cast of memorable characters.
Kit and Clem are best friends, and both are dealing with life-changing adversity.
Kit is tiny and afflicted with both alopecia universalis (a complete lack of hair that strangers interpret as a result of chemotherapy) and a dysfunctional mother who named her “kit”—not Kit—as a reminder to herself to “keep it together.” Clem, a member of her Latinx family’s acrobatic team, is badly injured during a televised performance. Once she’s recovered from the worst of her injuries, Clem endures her distress by taking on an angry goth identity that contrasts sharply with her previous image. Meanwhile, kit, who is white, copes with anxiety (mostly caused by her mother) by turning into a naked mole rat (the ugly animal her mother often compares her to) and scurrying for cover—or so she believes. The girls’ stories are presented in third-person chapters that seamlessly alternate, not only providing an intimate view of each character’s largely hidden despair, but also revealing their bemused, mostly concealed judgments of each other, as their coping mechanisms serve to drive them apart. A rich cast of secondary characters enhances the tale, including kit’s mom’s somewhat witchy helper and the young teens’ former friend, a kindly boy who has many problems of his own. An author’s note explores anxiety disorder.
A warm coming-of-age story populated with a cast of memorable characters. (Fiction. 9-12)Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61620-724-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2019
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