Comfortably typical kids on the cusp fumble toward coming-of-age with the odd cryptid and charging boar for thrills.
Four young people stumble into both danger and adolescence while searching for Bigfoot near their East Texas town.
News of a million-dollar prize for good pictures or video prompts preteen spark plug and narrator Everdil, armed with a new digital camera, to enlist her 13-year-old brother, Emmett, and schoolmate Tim in “Team Bigfoot.” Complications begin at once when Shawna, a former best friend who had moved away and cut ties, appears on her doorstep looking glamorous in makeup and showy clothes to join in the hunt. Anderson places her white quartet in Uncertain—a real hamlet with a history of Bigfoot sightings—and populates the nearby woods with hazards ranging from snakes and feral pigs to Swamp Sam, a local eccentric whose paranoid delusions have, it turns out, entered a new and scary phase. So, while Everdil pulls and pushes her way through evolving relationships with Tim, Shawna, and Emmett (a jock on his way to becoming an expert chef), the ongoing search moves toward a climax as harrowing and, nearly, tragic as it is revelatory. Finished illustrations not seen.
Comfortably typical kids on the cusp fumble toward coming-of-age with the odd cryptid and charging boar for thrills. (Fiction. 11-13)Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-944821-24-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Children's Brains are Yummy Books
Review Posted Online: June 13, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
This middle volume may make a zany-if-dark pulp TV movie, but as a novel, it’s only for high-fantasy addicts
In the sequel to Crown of Three (2015, with the author writing as J.D. Blackthorn), three young, white rulers-to-be fight undead hordes while trying to regain their inheritance.
When the lost heir is triplets, there's thrice the opportunity for cliché-packed heroic journeys. This high-fantasy quest begins midbattle, as the undead king massacres and zombifies an entire town. Evil King Brutan's prophesied babies were secreted away and raised separately. Now, 13 years later, Gulph is an acrobat, Elodie is a princess, and Tarlan is a feral lad raised with beasts. The three of them journey around the map of fantasyland, each learning about his or her own magical abilities. Tarlan (who speaks with animals) travels to the borders of the known world with the ancient wizard Melchior and fights a gratuitously invading army. Elodie (who talks to ghosts) sneakily spies on her wicked foster parents, who have creepily incestuous plans for her. Gulph (who can turn invisible) finds a long-lost realm where his allies seem to forget everything, even their own names. The trail of corpses seen and left by these 13-year-olds seems endless; Tarlan kills hundreds of soldiers with a single sword stroke. A heavy hand with the well-worn tropes of the genre replaces character development, and choppy, exclamation-point–laden prose stands in for the buildup of real tension.
This middle volume may make a zany-if-dark pulp TV movie, but as a novel, it’s only for high-fantasy addicts . (Fantasy. 11-12)Pub Date: May 31, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4814-2446-2
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Aladdin
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2016
A baroque premise fuels a reasonably adventuresome middle volume.
With the all-powerful Global Energy Trust hot on the trail, this sequel to The Arctic Code (2015) finds Eleanor and her ragtag band of allies mounting assaults on more of the alien devices that are rapidly forcing Earth into an ice age by sucking up its “telluric energy.”
Eluding armed G.E.T. agents as they go, the fugitives leave Alaska’s deep freeze behind to fly south toward Lake Titicaca—pausing, in an ironic touch, to gape at Mexico City’s massive sprawl of refugees from icy North America. The eldritch Concentrator is buried at a nexus of ley lines deep within submerged Incan ruins, and reaching it so that Eleanor can mentally kill the artificial intelligence that operates it isn’t going to be easy. Nor, for that matter, will escaping afterward, as betrayal leaves some group members in G.E.T. hands. Next stop: Luxor, another Concentrator, and another narrow escape. The author shoehorns in so much continuing conflict between Eleanor and her overprotective mother (both white), and also between another scientist and his two biracial sons (black/white), that the story often seems more about parent-child issues than saving the planet. Still, as Eleanor leads the way toward the Himalayas and a possibly climactic attack on the last and most powerful Concentrator, she’ll plainly be facing a new cascade of deadly dangers and soul-wrenching choices.
A baroque premise fuels a reasonably adventuresome middle volume. (Science fiction/fantasy hybrid. 11-13)Pub Date: May 10, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-06-222490-3
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Balzer + Bray/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2016
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