Fun for feline fanatics and light sci-fi lovers.
Wyss-Kuzz was such an evil warlord his feline people rose up and dusted off an ancient punishment: exile via teleporter to the most awful place in the cosmos, Earth.
Raj Bannerjee, soon-to-be sixth-grader, has been exiled from his beloved Brooklyn to Elba, Oregon, which is creepily full of nature. Unbeknownst to the Bannerjees, an alien has been banished to their front yard. Wyss-Kuzz, terrified of the liquid falling from the sky, seeks shelter in one of the fortresses inhabited by furless ogres who are so stupid they can’t understand his feline language (or recognize his vast superiority). Raj has always wanted a cat and promises to go to survival camp if he can keep Klawde, as his clueless father’s renamed the alien warlord. Can Raj survive survival camp? Can Wyss-Kuzz bend these disgusting primitives to his will and get them to build him a transporter so he can exact revenge on his home planet? Earth cats are imbeciles, but a mind-meld can conquer the language barrier with humans…but that may cause more troubles than it solves. Wyss-Kuzz and Raj trade off narration duties in Marciano and Chenoweth’s first of four hissterical interstellar adventures. Wyss-Kuzz’s constant misinterpretation of things earthly and Raj’s goofy new friends and enemies at camp will hook even reluctant readers. Mommaerts’s two-color, cartoon illustrations add more laughs as well as such background details as the Banerjees’ Ganesha to confirm their South Asian heritage. Sequel Enemies publishes simultaneously.
Fun for feline fanatics and light sci-fi lovers. (Science fiction. 7-11)Pub Date: Feb. 26, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5247-8720-2
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Penguin Workshop
Review Posted Online: Nov. 11, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A waggish tale with a serious (and timely) theme.
An age-old rivalry is reluctantly put aside when two young vacationers are lost in the wilderness.
Anthropomorphic—in body if definitely not behavior—Dogg Scout Oscar and pampered Molly Hissleton stray from their separate camps, meet by chance in a trackless magic forest, and almost immediately recognize that their only chance of survival, distasteful as the notion may be, lies in calling a truce. Patterson and Grabenstein really work the notion here that cooperation is better than prejudice founded on ignorance and habit, interspersing explicit exchanges on the topic while casting the squabbling pair with complementary abilities that come out as they face challenges ranging from finding food to escaping such predators as a mountain lion and a pack of vicious “weaselboars.” By the time they cross a wide river (on a raft steered by “Old Jim,” an otter whose homespun utterances are generally cribbed from Mark Twain—an uneasy reference) back to civilization, the two are BFFs. But can that friendship survive the return, with all the social and familial pressures to resume the old enmity? A climactic cage-match–style confrontation before a worked-up multispecies audience provides the answer. In the illustrations (not seen in finished form) López plops wide-eyed animal heads atop clothed, more or less human forms and adds dialogue balloons for punchlines.
A waggish tale with a serious (and timely) theme. (Fantasy. 9-11)Pub Date: April 1, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-316-41156-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Jimmy Patterson/Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Dec. 15, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2019
Another epic outing in a graphic hybrid series that continues not just to push the envelope, but tear it to shreds.
Pranksters George and Harold face the deadliest challenge of their checkered careers: a supersmart, superstrong gym teacher.
With the avowed aim of enticing an audience of “grouchy old people” to the Waistband Warrior’s latest exploit, Pilkey promises “references to health care, gardening, Bob Evans restaurants, hard candies, FOX News, and gentle-yet-effective laxatives.” He delivers, too. But lest fans of the Hanes-clad hero fret, he also stirs in plenty of fart jokes, brain-melting puns, and Flip-O-Rama throwdowns. After a meteorite transforms Mr. Meaner into a mad genius (evil, of course, because “as everyone knows, most gym teachers are inherently evil”) and he concocts a brown gas that turns children into blindly obedient homework machines, George and Harold travel into the future to enlist aid from their presumably immune adult selves. Temporarily leaving mates and children (of diverse sexes, both) behind, Old George and Old Harold come to the rescue. But Meaner has a robot suit (of course he has a robot suit), and he not only beats down the oldsters, but is only fazed for a moment when Capt. Underpants himself comes to deliver a kick to the crotch. Fortunately, gym teachers, “like toddlers,” will put anything in their mouths—so an ingestion of soda pop and Mentos at last spells doom, or more accurately: “CHeffGoal-D’BLOOOM!”
Another epic outing in a graphic hybrid series that continues not just to push the envelope, but tear it to shreds. (Graphic/fiction hybrid. 8-10)Pub Date: Aug. 25, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-545-50492-8
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Scholastic
Review Posted Online: May 17, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2015
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