An impassioned plea to children that should be more engaging.
Torrey, a young girl with legendary connections to the natural world, enlists the help of friends of various ethnic backgrounds to fight the monster that threatens to consume nature entirely.
The protagonist and her dog, Charlie-Gobbles, are surprised to find a sweet baby dragon in the park one evening. As it follows them home, Torrey realizes that the adults they pass do not see the creature, nor the red ribbon it tends to morph into when traveling in public. Children, on the other hand, are privy to the sight of the dragon that “seemed lost, almost as if someone had shocked him with a stun gun.” Once Torrey and her friends figure out what to feed it–the dragon reveals an indefatigable passion for vegetation–the creature starts to grow exponentially. Soon they discover the dragon is not quite as benign as they first thought. Overnight, it eats the park and makes a start on the surrounding nature preserve. Luckily, with the help of a wise Chinese hermit, the children form a plan to stop the beast. The book is a blatant call to arms, and Toman reveals more than a passing familiarity with biology and marine biology. Her descriptions of the fish tank and the paintings in Mr. Meng zi’s house include detailed lists of fish and animals, species thriving and extinct. She is obviously passionate about curbing global warming, but this passion is revealed through a plot that relies too heavily on manufactured coincidence, like Little Jiro’s collection of hat pins that they use to defeat the dragon, and stereotypical characters, like Mr. Meng zi, the Chinese hermit who reveals to Torrey her destiny as savior of the natural world. The author is capable of lovely phrases like, “The next morning, the sun fractured into the bedroom,” but the strength of these original descriptions is diluted by grammatical inconsistencies such as fluctuating verb tenses and adjective/adverb confusion. The few crayon drawings do not add enough visual flair to the book. Though it encourages children to take better care of the earth, this narrative doesn’t sufficiently impart the importance of stewardship.
An impassioned plea to children that should be more engaging.Pub Date: May 22, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-4392-3020-6
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A sparse, beautifully drawn story about a teen discovering her heritage.
In this YA graphic novel, an alienated Métis girl learns about her people’s Canadian history.
Métis teenager Echo Desjardins finds herself living in a home away from her mother, attending a new school, and feeling completely lonely as a result. She daydreams in class and wanders the halls listening to a playlist of her mother’s old CDs. At home, she shuts herself up in her room. But when her history teacher begins to lecture about the Pemmican Wars of early 1800s Saskatchewan, Echo finds herself swept back to that time. She sees the Métis people following the bison with their mobile hunting camp, turning the animals’ meat into pemmican, which they sell to the Northwest Company in order to buy supplies for the winter. Echo meets a young girl named Marie, who introduces Echo to the rhythms of Métis life. She finally understands what her Métis heritage actually means. But the joys are short-lived, as conflicts between the Métis and their rivals in the Hudson Bay Company come to a bloody head. The tragic history of her people will help explain the difficulties of the Métis in Echo’s own time, including those of her mother and the teen herself. Accompanied by dazzling art by Henderson (A Blanket of Butterflies, 2017, etc.) and colorist Yaciuk (Fire Starters, 2016, etc.), this tale is a brilliant bit of time travel. Readers are swept back to 19th-century Saskatchewan as fully as Echo herself. Vermette’s (The Break, 2017, etc.) dialogue is sparse, offering a mostly visual, deeply contemplative juxtaposition of the present and the past. Echo’s eventual encounter with her mother (whose fate has been kept from readers up to that point) offers a powerful moment of connection that is both unexpected and affecting. “Are you…proud to be Métis?” Echo asks her, forcing her mother to admit, sheepishly: “I don’t really know much about it.” With this series opener, the author provides a bit more insight into what that means.
A sparse, beautifully drawn story about a teen discovering her heritage.Pub Date: March 15, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-55379-678-7
Page Count: 48
Publisher: HighWater Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 28, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The format of this taut and moving drama forcefully regulates the pacing; breathless, edge-of-the-seat courtroom scenes...
In a riveting novel from Myers (At Her Majesty’s Request, 1999, etc.), a teenager who dreams of being a filmmaker writes the story of his trial for felony murder in the form of a movie script, with journal entries after each day’s action.
Steve is accused of being an accomplice in the robbery and murder of a drug store owner. As he goes through his trial, returning each night to a prison where most nights he can hear other inmates being beaten and raped, he reviews the events leading to this point in his life. Although Steve is eventually acquitted, Myers leaves it up to readers to decide for themselves on his protagonist’s guilt or innocence.
The format of this taut and moving drama forcefully regulates the pacing; breathless, edge-of-the-seat courtroom scenes written entirely in dialogue alternate with thoughtful, introspective journal entries that offer a sense of Steve’s terror and confusion, and that deftly demonstrate Myers’s point: the road from innocence to trouble is comprised of small, almost invisible steps, each involving an experience in which a “positive moral decision” was not made. (Fiction. 12-14)Pub Date: May 31, 1999
ISBN: 0-06-028077-8
Page Count: 280
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1999
PERSPECTIVES
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