An entertaining fantasy that prepares readers for more tumultuous series installments.
A daring boy once more travels to a magical realm through a secret doorway in this third installment of a middle-grade adventure series.
Eleven-year-old Hunter Wilson has just returned from an escapade with pirates on a fantastical world. He’s brought back a sword, a wand, and gold pieces as souvenirs. And while he left home through a puddle—acting as a magical Door—he returned from the realm in a neighbor’s house. Now, Hunter is grounded for two weeks. As he curbs his reckless behavior and improves his grades, he misses the excitement and Murphy, the giant dog he befriended on the Door’s other side. He remains on the lookout for another Door, knowing that an evil king sealed them. With his grounding nearly over, Hunter visits his friends Gertrude Clemmons and David Kim. On the way home from Gert’s house, he finds a ring of toadstools. Stepping into the ring causes it to spin. Hunter is transported into the presence of the Elder Folk, or fae, including elves, gnomes, and pixies. They wonder if he’s the legendary Dark Child, seeing in his possession a wand of rowan and an iron sword once belonging to “the Great King of Albion.” Hunter eventually meets King Oberon and Queen Titania, who rule the fae court. Can he find a way to reopen all the Doors between realms? Genzano’s latest Stranger World outing gives readers another genre to dive into, this time traditional fantasy. In his long, descriptive passages are evocative lines: “One tower rose up on a twisting spindle that looked as thin as a flower stem, and then blossomed into a gigantic curving pile of heavy stone.” But sometimes the author assumes his young audience’s familiarity with the classics, mentioning the “Eye of Sauron” from The Lord of the Rings series with no explanation. A larger story is seeded with the appearance of Esthuan Thievesbane, an emissary of the king in the Fortress in the Sky, who’s imprisoned by the fae. The brief chapters about her hint that war may be coming to the Stranger World universe, along with a welcome rise in stakes.
An entertaining fantasy that prepares readers for more tumultuous series installments.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 103
Publisher: Manuscript
Review Posted Online: Sept. 24, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A sly, side-splitting hoot from start to finish.
The dreary prospect of spending a lifetime making caskets instead of wonderful inventions prompts a young orphan to snatch up his little sister and flee. Where? To the circus, of course.
Fortunately or otherwise, John and 6-year-old Page join up with Boz—sometime human cannonball for the seedy Wandering Wayfarers and a “vertically challenged” trickster with a fantastic gift for sowing chaos. Alas, the budding engineer barely has time to settle in to begin work on an experimental circus wagon powered by chicken poop and dubbed (with questionable forethought) the Autopsy. The hot pursuit of malign and indomitable Great-Aunt Beauregard, the Coggins’ only living relative, forces all three to leave the troupe for further flights and misadventures. Teele spins her adventure around a sturdy protagonist whose love for his little sister is matched only by his fierce desire for something better in life for them both and tucks in an outstanding supporting cast featuring several notably strong-minded, independent women (Page, whose glare “would kill spiders dead,” not least among them). Better yet, in Boz she has created a scene-stealing force of nature, a free spirit who’s never happier than when he’s stirring up mischief. A climactic clutch culminating in a magnificently destructive display of fireworks leaves the Coggin sibs well-positioned for bright futures. (Illustrations not seen.)
A sly, side-splitting hoot from start to finish. (Adventure. 11-13)Pub Date: April 12, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-06-234510-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Walden Pond Press/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
Series fans, at least, will take this outing (and clear evidence of more to come) in stride.
Zipping back and forth in time atop outsized robo–bell bottoms, mad inventor Tippy Tinkletrousers (aka Professor Poopypants) legs his way to center stage in this slightly less-labored continuation of episode 9.
The action commences after a rambling recap and a warning not to laugh or smile on pain of being forced to read Sarah Plain and Tall. Pilkey first sends his peevish protagonist back a short while to save the Earth (destroyed in the previous episode), then on to various prehistoric eras in pursuit of George, Harold and the Captain. It’s all pretty much an excuse for many butt jokes, dashes of off-color humor (“Tippy pressed the button on his Freezy-Beam 4000, causing it to rise from the depths of his Robo-Pants”), a lengthy wordless comic and two tussles in “Flip-o-rama.” Still, the chase kicks off an ice age, the extinction of the dinosaurs and the Big Bang (here the Big “Ka-Bloosh!”). It ends with a harrowing glimpse of what George and Harold would become if they decided to go straight. The author also chucks in a poopy-doo-doo song with musical notation (credited to Albert P. Einstein) and plenty of ink-and-wash cartoon illustrations to crank up the ongoing frenzy.
Series fans, at least, will take this outing (and clear evidence of more to come) in stride. (Fantasy. 10-12)Pub Date: Jan. 15, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-545-17536-4
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Scholastic
Review Posted Online: Dec. 12, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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