Goofball comedy with heart
A trio of 11-year-old boys goes on a zany, coincidence-packed journey after one experiences a death in the family.
Fred’s got only his dad and his grandmother, and his dad’s been laid up ever since the accident with the mail truck. His two best mates will soon be away for the summer. Ben’s going to the States and Disney World, which would be brilliant except for Ben’s horrible stepmother, and Charlie’s off to vegan camp because his mother wants him to lose weight. The beginning of the summer holidays takes a turn from merely bad to horrible when Fred’s grandmother dies suddenly. A letter Grams left for him reveals something Fred had assumed he’d never learn: the name and birthplace of his biological father, Alan Froggley, who abandoned his pregnant mother before he was born. (She died shortly after.) In a flash of inspiration that makes complete sense to the grief-stricken Fred, he decides on a quest to find Alan Froggley in Wales. Fred has no intention of replacing his real dad, whom he adores, but he’s seeking…something. Family? Connection? Answers? Ben and Charlie join him for a slapstick adventure across Wales, with cinematic middle school humor marred only by Charlie’s characterization via an endless stream of fat jokes. The boys (seemingly all white) are mistaken for both superheroes and saints by Welsh villagers, and they are chased by a taxi-driving, gun-wielding criminal. By some fluke, all their adventures are connected, as Fred the narrator continuously foreshadows.
Goofball comedy with heart . (Fiction. 9-11)Pub Date: May 12, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-324-01133-0
Page Count: 235
Publisher: Norton Young Readers
Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2020
The journey is even gently funny—Omakayas’s brother spends much of the year with a porcupine on his head. Charming and...
This third entry in the Birchbark House series takes Omakayas and her family west from their home on the Island of the Golden-Breasted Woodpecker, away from land the U.S. government has claimed.
Difficulties abound; the unknown landscape is fraught with danger, and they are nearing hostile Bwaanag territory. Omakayas’s family is not only close, but growing: The travelers adopt two young chimookoman (white) orphans along the way. When treachery leaves them starving and alone in a northern Minnesota winter, it will take all of their abilities and love to survive. The heartwarming account of Omakayas’s year of travel explores her changing family relationships and culminates in her first moon, the onset of puberty. It would be understandable if this darkest-yet entry in Erdrich’s response to the Little House books were touched by bitterness, yet this gladdening story details Omakayas’s coming-of-age with appealing optimism.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-06-029787-9
Page Count: 208
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2008
A fizzy mix of low humor and brisk action, with promise of more of both to come.
Heroic deeds await Isaac after his little sister runs into the school basement and is captured by elves.
Even though their school is a spooky old castle transplanted stone by stone from Germany, Isaac and his two friends, Max and Emma, little suspect that an entire magical kingdom lies beneath—a kingdom run by elves, policed by oversized rats in uniform, and populated by captives who start out human but undergo transformative “weirding.” These revelations await Isaac and sidekicks as they nerve themselves to trail his bossy younger sib, Lily, through a shadowy storeroom and into a tunnel, across a wide lake, and into a city lit by half-human fireflies, where they are cast together into a dungeon. Can they escape before they themselves start changing? Gibson pits his doughty rescuers against such adversaries as an elven monarch who emits truly kingly belches and a once-human jailer with a self-picking nose. Tests of mettle range from a riddle contest to a face-off with the menacing head rat Shelfliver, and a helter-skelter chase finally leads rescuers and rescued back to the aboveground. Plainly, though, there is further rescuing to be done.
A fizzy mix of low humor and brisk action, with promise of more of both to come. (Fantasy. 9-11)Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-62370-255-7
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Capstone Young Readers
Review Posted Online: June 28, 2015
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