A captivating game of cat and mouse.
Set in 19th-century Stockholm, this Swedish import sees Mika involved in a mystery that hits close to home.
Twelve-year-old Mika has noticed some distance lately between herself and some of the other older residents of the Public Children’s Home, from Rufus, riding high on an unexpected apprenticeship, to Ossian, whom she discovers hiding a valuable he says someone gifted to him. A family in need of cheap labor wants to adopt Ossian, but he runs away. Constable Valdemar—with whom she solved a murder in The Night Raven (2023)—approaches her for assistance in dealing with a rash of juvenile pickpocketing, leaving her fearful for Ossian’s fate. He’s gotten mixed up with Henrietta, a clever and charismatic knife-throwing performer who’s apparently luring orphans with the promise of a found family. Mika tries to find proof of Henrietta’s true activities, only to get framed for a crime she didn’t commit. She ends up experiencing the same push-pull tug of desperation and hope that brings the orphans to Henrietta, leading her to make an unthinkable choice. Her natural intelligence and her critical thinking, however, keep her eyes clear enough to untangle lies. The true mystery is foreshadowed well and integrates nicely with Mika’s ongoing self-discovery. As in the previous book, Rundberg establishes a strong sense of suspense and brings 1880s Sweden to life beautifully. Characters are cued white.
A captivating game of cat and mouse. (Historical thriller. 9-14)Pub Date: March 5, 2024
ISBN: 9781662509629
Page Count: 207
Publisher: Amazon Crossing Kids
Review Posted Online: Dec. 16, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2024
Fast-paced and plot-driven.
In his latest, prolific author Gratz takes on Hitler’s Olympic Games.
When 13-year-old American gymnast Evie Harris arrives in Berlin to compete in the 1936 Olympic Games, she has one goal: stardom. If she can bring home a gold medal like her friend, the famous equestrian-turned-Hollywood-star Mary Brooks, she might be able to lift her family out of their Dust Bowl poverty. But someone slips a strange note under Evie’s door, and soon she’s dodging Heinz Fischer, the Hitler Youth member assigned to host her, and meeting strangers who want to make use of her gymnastic skills—to rob a bank. As the games progress, Evie begins to see the moral issues behind their sparkling facade—the antisemitism and racism inherent in Nazi ideology and the way Hitler is using the competition to support and promote these beliefs. And she also agrees to rob the bank. Gratz goes big on the Mission Impossible–style heist, which takes center stage over the actual competitions, other than Jesse Owens’ famous long jump. A lengthy and detailed author’s note provides valuable historical context, including places where Gratz adapted the facts for storytelling purposes (although there’s no mention of the fact that before 1952, Olympic equestrian sports were limited to male military officers). With an emphasis on the plot, many of the characters feel defined primarily by how they’re suffering under the Nazis, such as the fictional diver Ursula Diop, who was involuntarily sterilized for being biracial.
Fast-paced and plot-driven. (Historical fiction. 9-12)Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2025
ISBN: 9781338736106
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Scholastic
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2025
Good Guys and Bad get just deserts in the end, and Stanley gets plenty of opportunities to display pluck and valor in this...
Sentenced to a brutal juvenile detention camp for a crime he didn't commit, a wimpy teenager turns four generations of bad family luck around in this sunburnt tale of courage, obsession, and buried treasure from Sachar (Wayside School Gets a Little Stranger, 1995, etc.).
Driven mad by the murder of her black beau, a schoolteacher turns on the once-friendly, verdant town of Green Lake, Texas, becomes feared bandit Kissin' Kate Barlow, and dies, laughing, without revealing where she buried her stash. A century of rainless years later, lake and town are memories—but, with the involuntary help of gangs of juvenile offenders, the last descendant of the last residents is still digging. Enter Stanley Yelnats IV, great-grandson of one of Kissin' Kate's victims and the latest to fall to the family curse of being in the wrong place at the wrong time; under the direction of The Warden, a woman with rattlesnake venom polish on her long nails, Stanley and each of his fellow inmates dig a hole a day in the rock-hard lake bed. Weeks of punishing labor later, Stanley digs up a clue, but is canny enough to conceal the information of which hole it came from. Through flashbacks, Sachar weaves a complex net of hidden relationships and well-timed revelations as he puts his slightly larger-than-life characters under a sun so punishing that readers will be reaching for water bottles.
Good Guys and Bad get just deserts in the end, and Stanley gets plenty of opportunities to display pluck and valor in this rugged, engrossing adventure. (Fiction. 9-13)Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 978-0-374-33265-5
Page Count: 233
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2000
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