A pleaser for young swashbucklers.
It’s living pirates vs. the other sort when ghost buccaneers repeatedly ransack the town of Dull-on-Sea.
First met as picture-book Pirates Next Door (2012), the nautical Jolley-Rogers family sails back into view in a multichapter yarn—responding to young pirate-loving ex-neighbor Matilda’s plea for help. It seems that every full moon brings dead Cap’n Twirlybeard and his knavish crew ashore in search of both plunder and a certain long lost key. According to Grandpa Rogers, only unlocking the sea chest that contains their scurvy souls can scupper the attacks. Can Matilda and her piratical friend Jim Lad find the missing key, keep it out of Twirlybeard’s clutches, and sneak aboard the spectral pirate ship Black Rat to open the chest at last? Duddle punctuates his larger-than-average prose with theatrical verse (“Some say we’re cursed, some say we’re dead! / We’re in search of a key as you sleep in bed!”) and tucks in plenty of elaborately detailed monochrome illustrations featuring a likewise monochrome cast of comically clueless white landlubbers and leering corsairs in classic pirate garb. A rousingly melodramatic face-off ends as it should, whereupon the Jolley-Rogers sail off once again…and into the clutches of a trio of witchy “sea hags” in the co-published next episode, The Jolley-Rogers and the Cave of Doom. Now, it’s Matilda’s turn to come to the rescue.
A pleaser for young swashbucklers. (glossary) (Fantasy. 8-10)Pub Date: Aug. 2, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-7636-8910-0
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Templar/Candlewick
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Gentle, encouraging, witty fantasy that may soothe readers suffering from climate anxiety.
Children with magical talking steam trains are thrilled by their clever new plan to rescue endangered animals.
Eleven-year-old Kate absolutely adores her secret job—helping animals in need by using the magical locomotive that was a gift from her billionaire wizard uncle. Kate loves riding the Silver Arrow with Uncle Herbert; her brother, Tom; and the talking animals they escort to safe places. But now Uncle Herbert is missing, 9-year-old Tom seems more interested in hapkido than their supernatural train, and Kate’s struggling socially and academically thanks to her eco-anxiety. No matter how many animals she helps, no matter how many adults proclaim that climate change is a critical issue, the environment keeps getting worse. One night Kate discovers another train driving on the magical railroad: The Golden Swift is conducted by her classmate Jag, who thinks rescuing stranded creatures isn’t sufficiently radical. When Kate joins him, she feels more inspired and more righteous than ever before. This time, she’s actually making the world better! Kate’s unhappy discoveries of unintended consequences and the moral complexities of her activism are softened by humor. The snarky banter of the talking locomotive is an understated delight, as is the train constructed with, among others, candy and ice cream cars, an invisible car, and a dojo car. Kate and Tom are White; Jag is described as having dark skin and black hair and possibly being Indian. Charming illustrations enhance the text.
Gentle, encouraging, witty fantasy that may soothe readers suffering from climate anxiety. (Fantasy. 8-10)Pub Date: May 3, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-316-28354-0
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
A decent start to a silly sci-fi series.
An extraterrestrial teen refugee becomes a Hollywood star.
Citizen Short Nose, a 13-year-old, blue-skinned, six-eyed, bipedal ET, has left his home world in an effort to escape the authoritarian forces that reign there. The teen runaway lands his spacecraft in the middle of Universal Studios and easily blends in among the tourists and actors in movie costumes. Citizen Short Nose quickly changes his name to Buddy C. Burger and befriends Luis Rivera, an 18-year-old Latinx actor who moonlights as Frankenstein on the Universal lot. Inspired to be an actor by his grandmother Wrinkle’s love of Earth culture, Buddy lands a gig on Oddball Academy, playing (of course) an alien from another world. On set, Buddy befriends Cassidy Cambridge, the brown-skinned teen star of the show. Buddy balances keeping his true identity secret (everyone just assumes he’s wearing an alien costume) with becoming an overnight sensation. The book is efficiently written, moving the story forward so quickly that readers won’t have time to think too hard about the bizarre circumstances necessary for the whole thing to work. This series opener’s big problem is the ending: The story just stops. Characters are established and plot mechanics are put together, but the book basically trusts readers to show up for the next installment. Those enamored with Hollywood gags and sci-fi plot boiling will probably be engaged enough to do so.
A decent start to a silly sci-fi series. (Science fiction. 8-10)Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-4197-3369-7
Page Count: 264
Publisher: Amulet/Abrams
Review Posted Online: Aug. 11, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
