An orphaned young student of legerdemain sets himself to unraveling a once-wealthy family’s deadly squabbles in this rough-edged but promising debut. Chafing at his miserable existence as the ward of a stumblebum sideshow conjurer, Jago overhears a conversation that leads to his discovery of a gold watch with a note tucked inside, and then on to a secretive maid, her gentleman lover, a beautiful schemer, a brutish con man, hidden treasure and all sorts of chases, captures, escapes, clues and twists. It all leads from the squalid back alleys of Winchester to a properly melodramatic denouement aboard a storm-tossed ship headed for Brazil. The author isn’t always careful with details in this tale of 19th-century England (there’s an anachronistic reference to a 20th-century typeface, for instance) and she never gets around to giving Jago a credible motive for poking his nose into the entire dangerous business, but she does fold in several surprises and deftly incorporates Jago’s skills at misdirection and sleight-of-hand. (Historical fiction. 11-13)
Pub Date: April 30, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-8234-2150-3
Page Count: 168
Publisher: Holiday House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2008
Narrow squeaks aplenty combine with bursts of lyrical prose for a satisfying adventure
A Prohibition-era child enlists a gifted pickpocket and a pair of budding circus performers in a clever ruse to save her ancestral home from being stolen by developers.
Rundell sets her iron-jawed protagonist on a seemingly impossible quest: to break into the ramshackle Hudson River castle from which her grieving grandfather has been abruptly evicted by unscrupulous con man Victor Sorrotore and recover a fabulously valuable hidden emerald. Laying out an elaborate scheme in a notebook that itself turns out to be an integral part of the ensuing caper, Vita, only slowed by a bout with polio years before, enlists a team of helpers. Silk, a light-fingered orphan, aspiring aerialist Samuel Kawadza, and Arkady, a Russian lad with a remarkable affinity for and with animals, all join her in a series of expeditions, mostly nocturnal, through and under Manhattan. The city never comes to life the way the human characters do (Vita, for instance, “had six kinds of smile, and five of them were real”) but often does have a tangible presence, and notwithstanding Vita’s encounter with a (rather anachronistically styled) “Latina” librarian, period attitudes toward race and class are convincingly drawn. Vita, Silk, and Arkady all present white; Samuel, a Shona immigrant from Southern Rhodesia, is the only primary character of color. Santoso’s vignettes of, mostly, animals and small items add occasional visual grace notes.
Narrow squeaks aplenty combine with bursts of lyrical prose for a satisfying adventure . (Historical fiction. 11-13)Pub Date: Aug. 27, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-4814-1948-2
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 25, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2019
Low in physical violence, while being rich in moral and ethical issues, as well as in appealingly complex characters and...
Pub Date: March 1, 2007
ISBN: 0-316-05777-0
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Megan Tingley/Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2007
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