Goofy, overenthusiastic nonsense with just enough rambling plot to hold it all together
Falcon Quinn returns to another exclamation mark–laden year at a school where nobody understands him, the poor little angel—literally.
At the end of his last year at the Monster Academy, Falcon discovered his angelic nature as well as his true parentage: His father is the demonic Academy headmaster Crow; his mother, queen of the monster-killing guardians. None of this knowledge has made him any more popular. The other kids don't trust him anyway, and it doesn't help that he keeps finding himself in ridiculous scrapes. Did Falcon try to kill his friend Pearl, the famous Chupakabra of Peru? Did he stuff Quagmire, the puddle of bubbling glop, in his godzooka during band practice? When Falcon flees from monsters and finds himself among guardians, he discovers those monster-killers resemble his monster friends more closely than either side would like to admit. The silliness is consistently funny but not consistently age-appropriate; a pirate referring to the bottom of the sea as "Peter Tork's locker" is a groaner that will zoom right over the heads of middle-school readers. For the most part, however, egg-laying werechicken boys and Hamlet "as written in the original Frankenstein dialect" will keep giggles coming. The humor provides necessary counterpoint to the trowelled-on nobody-loves-me angst.
Goofy, overenthusiastic nonsense with just enough rambling plot to hold it all together . (Fantasy. 9-11)Pub Date: May 10, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-06-172835-8
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Katherine Tegen/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: April 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
Epic—in plot, not length—and as wise and wonderful as Gerald Morris’ Arthurian exploits.
Who needs dragons when there are Terrible Lizards to be fought?
Having recklessly boasted to King Arthur and the court that he’d slain 40 dragons, Sir Erec can hardly refuse when Merlin offers him more challenging foes…and so it is that in no time (so to speak), Erec, with bookish Sir Hector, the silent and enigmatic Black Knight, and blustering Sir Bors with his thin but doughty squire, Mel, in tow, are hewing away at fearsome creatures sporting natural armor and weapons every bit as effective as knightly ones. Happily, while all the glorious mashing and bashing leads to awesome feats aplenty—who would suspect that a ravening T. Rex could be decked by a well-placed punch to the jaw?—when the dust settles neither bloodshed nor permanent injury has been dealt to either side. Better yet, not even the stunning revelation that two of the Three Stooges–style bumblers aren’t what they seem (“Anyone else here a girl?”) keeps the questers from developing into a well-knit team capable of repeatedly saving one another’s bacon. Phelan endows the all-white human cast with finely drawn, eloquently expressive faces but otherwise works in a loose, movement-filled style, pitting his clanking crew against an almost nonstop onslaught of toothy monsters in a monochrome mix of single scenes and occasional wordless sequential panels.
Epic—in plot, not length—and as wise and wonderful as Gerald Morris’ Arthurian exploits. (Graphic/fantasy hybrid. 9-11)Pub Date: Oct. 23, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-06-268623-7
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Greenwillow Books
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2018
PROFILES
A waggish tale with a serious (and timely) theme.
An age-old rivalry is reluctantly put aside when two young vacationers are lost in the wilderness.
Anthropomorphic—in body if definitely not behavior—Dogg Scout Oscar and pampered Molly Hissleton stray from their separate camps, meet by chance in a trackless magic forest, and almost immediately recognize that their only chance of survival, distasteful as the notion may be, lies in calling a truce. Patterson and Grabenstein really work the notion here that cooperation is better than prejudice founded on ignorance and habit, interspersing explicit exchanges on the topic while casting the squabbling pair with complementary abilities that come out as they face challenges ranging from finding food to escaping such predators as a mountain lion and a pack of vicious “weaselboars.” By the time they cross a wide river (on a raft steered by “Old Jim,” an otter whose homespun utterances are generally cribbed from Mark Twain—an uneasy reference) back to civilization, the two are BFFs. But can that friendship survive the return, with all the social and familial pressures to resume the old enmity? A climactic cage-match–style confrontation before a worked-up multispecies audience provides the answer. In the illustrations (not seen in finished form) López plops wide-eyed animal heads atop clothed, more or less human forms and adds dialogue balloons for punchlines.
A waggish tale with a serious (and timely) theme. (Fantasy. 9-11)Pub Date: April 1, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-316-41156-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Jimmy Patterson/Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Dec. 15, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2019
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