A rousing pirate tale and a welcome addition to the Flurry series.
A courageous bear sails the high seas in this fifth installment of a children’s fantasy series.
Back at home after his latest exploits, Flurry, the live teddy bear, is annoyed when his human mother admonishes him for stealing a pirate movie. Flurry goes to bed, only to wake up to discover that his room has been replaced by the ocean. Flurry and his four plush friends—Noah, Boaz, Honja, and Caboose—pilot their floating bed to shore, where they find themselves on the outskirts of Tigris, a city inhabited by walking, talking tigers. They quickly run into Flurry’s old friend Chingu and old frenemy Drizzle, who are in Tigris looking for Chingu’s brother, Shinyuu, who has been seized by pirates. The group manages to locate Shinyuu, but only after being abducted. They learn they are being taken to the dreaded pirate king Black Bear’d. “He’s the most ruthless and evil pirate there ever was,” another prisoner informs them. “He’s as ferocious at sea as any other grizzly bear would be on land.” A new mission emerges: rescue the captured Capt. White Cloud and keep Black Bear’d from building a secret army, whose vile purposes are more than those of the average pirate. The biggest thing standing in their way is Black Bear’d’s powerful sorcerer, Theran—and, of course, Flurry’s penchant for letting his pride screw up the plans of his friends. Skye’s (Churchianity Pandemic, 2017, etc.) prose is direct and lively, conveying the excitement that Flurry feels through every step of the escapade. The book succeeds in evoking the unfettered imagination of youth: simple conflicts of good vs. evil, with plenty of cannons, sword fights, and swashbuckling. The author makes a minor nod to the trauma these recurring conflicts have on the protagonist—“Flurry’s parents managed to make an arrangement for him to get therapy over the phone, since it would not be possible to take a living, breathing teddy bear to the therapist’s office”—but in general this is adventure without consequence, experienced by a hero who is part animal, part toy, and part energetic boy who never wants to go to bed.
A rousing pirate tale and a welcome addition to the Flurry series.Pub Date: June 30, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-692-47805-9
Page Count: 268
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Aug. 3, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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