A swift, unwavering pace complements sublimely complex characters.
In Brown’s YA adventure, an accident turns an 18-year-old female member of a city’s elite team of protectors into a superhero.
Delilah Greyson is just one of five trainees remaining in the competition to join the Defenders. There’s only one open spot on the team, which protects the citizens of Charlotte. All of Delilah’s training pays off, and she becomes the newest member. Unfortunately, team leader Jake blames her for their failure to capture the Amphibian—a giant monster terrorizing Charlotte—and benches her for subsequent missions. While on probation, Delilah searches for an unfinished invention (courtesy of the team’s second-in-command and resident nerd, David), seemingly for revenge against Jake, who locked away the unstable machine in his office. Inadvertently turning on the machine, she survives an ensuing explosion and wakes up sporting feathers and birdlike powers (e.g., flight). Delilah, in disguise, takes on the city’s criminals, which may include Elemental, a masked female with fire-and-ice powers. Elemental’s objectives, however, are ambiguous: cops have tried to stop her from freezing a river, but she’s also saved people from the Amphibian. Delilah, working with the Defenders as the White Dove (and still largely unidentified), will have to identify the real villain(s). Brown’s tongue-in-cheek novel acknowledges its absurdity while instilling chic comic-book components. Delilah, for example, initially describes herself as “a giant bird lady” but, in confrontations with baddies, coolly pulls feathers out of her wrist to use as weapons. The theme of good vs. bad—and the shades in between—is strong throughout and leads to a twist or two involving a few characters. The plot, however, occasionally baffles; at least one character, for example, knows Elemental’s true identity and has no discernible reason for keeping that info from Delilah. Regardless, superpowers are smartly incorporated. Elemental’s hair and outfit colors depend on which power she’s using, while Delilah’s flight is freedom from her Defenders probation. At the same time, the powers aren’t superficial; fire and ice correlate with Elemental’s apparent bipolar personality.
A swift, unwavering pace complements sublimely complex characters.Pub Date: March 15, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4582-2010-3
Page Count: 188
Publisher: AbbottPress
Review Posted Online: Oct. 24, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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