A fresh and pleasing Continental sojourn for chapter-book readers.
Primo is sure that the gold ring he finds in a fish’s stomach must have magical powers. But what are they?
This is the second in a series featuring five young cousins living in an Italian town renowned for its witches. It opens with a letter from a local demon about the town’s (purported) supernatural residents, closes with a more expansive “Witchonary,” and in between chronicles Primo’s efforts to prove his courage and his newly found ring’s magic. But nothing goes right: his prank-loving cousin Rosa refuses to take his claims seriously; an all-night vigil is wasted when the witchy, mischief-making Janara fail to appear; and his quest is trumped by cousin Maria Beppina, who is (supposedly) captured by the scary Clopper after she borrows the ring and reappears with a hair-raising tale. Ultimately an encounter, or a near-encounter anyway, with a child-snatching Manalonga draws praise from Primo’s peers, and all race away to dance the tarantella at a village party. Blackall places her gesticulating, expressive figures, clad in antique country dress, between and beside passages of narrative; they have a timeless look in keeping with the episode’s folkloric air. As in co-published opener Mischief Season, magic weaves its way through both setting and events without quite becoming explicit.
A fresh and pleasing Continental sojourn for chapter-book readers. (map, historical note) (Fantasy. 8-10)Pub Date: April 12, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-451-47180-2
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Jan. 8, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2016
In this nearly all-dialogue series-opener, a quintet of young superheroes with unusually kidlike powers squares off against a noise-hating mad scientist. Despite continual efforts to keep it down, Daniel is cursed with such loud pipes that no window or water glass is safe in his presence. This earns him a quick detention in his new school, where he meets three fellow fifth-graders with their own exaggerated abilities to annoy: Rex Rodriguez instantly breaks anything he touches; Violet Fitz can produce world-class tantrums; and Sid Down raises hyperactivity to high art. As it turns out, all four were test subjects as newborns, exposed to a defective “Behavio-Ray” that was supposed to make them permanently docile but had the opposite effect. Now the ray’s developer, Otis “Old Fogey” Fogelman, is back with an improved product, and plans to try it out on the entire planet—starting with his first batch of failures. Joined by Daniel’s babbling little sister Jeannie S. (who lives up to her name), the young folk do brisk battle in brightly colored, easy-to-“read” cartoon frames, win a victory and by the end have not only cool new names like “Tantrum Girl” and “Destructo Kid,” but even a clubhouse. Stay tuned for further world-saving. (Graphic fiction. 8-10)
Pub Date: March 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-448-44698-1
Page Count: 96
Publisher: Grosset & Dunlap
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A strange, whimsical debut that may never quite convince readers why they should care about it.
Carly Bean Bitters is a likable 11-year-old with a strange malady: She is awake at night and sleeps during the day. This allows her to notice a strange phenomenon—a squash that appears on her roof. Carly soon meets Lewis, a musician and a rat, who explains that the squash is a member of his band, taking the place of a rat who has been abducted by owls. When Lewis introduces Carly to the other members of his rat community in the Whistle Root woods, she learns that the owls’ current behavior is abnormal—they used to dance to the rats’ moonlight tunes before they suddenly began snatching them. Thus begins a bizarre journey for Carly, who must discover the reason behind the owls’ sudden change of heart and other strange occurrences in the woods and her town. Though the back story behind the Whistle Root wood and various characters’ behavior is eventually explained, the explanations themselves are often disjointed and don’t quite add up. This feeling of arbitrariness makes it hard for readers to engage with the rats’ plight. While this quiet book achieves a timeless feel—being identifiably set neither in our world nor in another—this cannot atone for a history of the magical woods and creatures that sometimes feels nonsensical. (Fantasy. 8-10)
Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-547-79263-7
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Aug. 13, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2013
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