Enjoyably mysterious.
There’s something strange about Mellie’s foundling cat…is Bert a zombie?!
Nine-year-old Mellie has no interest in being a part of her parents’ food-and-family blog. Her mother and father (a former freelance writer and former chef, respectively) are so busy with the blog and her twin younger brothers that she’s pretty free-range. She spends a lot of her time helping her best friend, Danny, make horror movies. When the two of them discover a disheveled cat in a dumpster, Mellie feels drawn to the sickly feline; she sneaks him home, names him Bert, and doesn’t tell her parents. Meanwhile the Big Boss of a local lab is not pleased that two of his workers have allowed test subject Y-91 to escape, and he orders them to find it. Bert isn’t interested in cat food or even salmon, but he brings Mellie headless animal corpses…could he be a zombie eating only the animals’ brains?! When Bert’s accused of hurting the school bully’s pet rats (and thus brought to the attention of Mellie’s parents), she may not be able to keep him. This slim series opener feels like the start of a novel more than a whole book, as so much is left unresolved at the close. The parallel stories of Mellie’s discovery of Bert, the search for Y-91, and Bert, as he pursues a mission of his own, will keep young fans of the slightly spooky turning pages…and eager for the next installment. In Andrews’ illustrations, Mellie and her mom have dark skin while her dad and the twins have light skin.
Enjoyably mysterious. (Science fiction. 7-10)Pub Date: July 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5362-0106-2
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Candlewick
Review Posted Online: May 2, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2020
Whether they live with dogs or not, readers will absorb some truths about family vacations and the true care of animal...
Lulu and Mellie, 7-year-old cousins and best friends, share a summer outing with lots of doggy goodness.
The cottage by the sea is not exactly what Lulu’s parents had envisioned—it is rather far from the beach, there are only two cups and two glasses, and the caretaker is grumpy and warns them about a stray, savage dog. The girls, however, are delighted, especially when Lulu, who loves animals, spots a very unkempt dog. Restaurant folk and the ice-cream-stand people know about the dog, too. Soon readers meet him, and they learn that he was born behind the Golden Lotus restaurant, that his mother and sisters were taken by the dogcatcher, and that he survives by stealing from picnics and garbage cans and by avoiding grown-ups. Lulu has brought Sam, her elderly dog, on vacation, too, but that does not stop her from finding ways of feeding and encouraging the stray “dog from the sea.” When the kite that has been Mellie’s vacation project leads the girls out at dawn and into some difficulty, it is the dog from the sea who overcomes his fear of adults and leads them to the lost and frightened girls. Thus, Lulu’s menagerie grows as the vacation week ends, and two dogs come home.
Whether they live with dogs or not, readers will absorb some truths about family vacations and the true care of animal companions in the company of Lulu and Mellie, who are as utterly charming and as completely age 7 as possible. (Fiction. 7-9)Pub Date: March 1, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-8075-4820-2
Page Count: 112
Publisher: Whitman
Review Posted Online: Jan. 15, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2013
White bread. Consider Jane O’Connor’s Nancy Clancy, Super Sleuth (2012) instead.
After a long hiatus, the Spotlight Club Mysteries return with a new posthumous entry and a paperback reprint of another.
Blond siblings Cindy and Jay, of indeterminate age, and their neighbor Dexter, distinct mainly because he wears glasses, solve mysteries together in a fictional town so mild it could be a Beverly Cleary setting. However, whereas the physical safety of Klickitat Street exists to highlight emotional and developmental depth, Parry and Pierce’s town—Kenoska—houses whodunits (or what-is-its) that characters easily glide through, enthusiastic but free from disputes or sweat. In this world, adult strangers are no actual threat, and a child can pick up prescription medication. (In contrast, kid-made gravestone rubbings sell for $15 apiece. Really?) The kids bike around town between home and the cemetery, earning money to save a museum and forging connections among a wrought-iron bench, a missing locket, feuding adult sisters and a long-dead artist. Answers are too thin, results too perfect. A second title, publishing simultaneously, Mystery of the Bewitched Bookmobile, offers a bit more meat and interest—climbing into a bookmobile in the dark; decoding a painted sign—but feels even more dated due to old-fashioned telephone numbers and a librarian (Cindy’s role model) who wants nothing more than to be asked on a date.
White bread. Consider Jane O’Connor’s Nancy Clancy, Super Sleuth (2012) instead. (Mystery. 7-10)Pub Date: March 1, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-8075-7695-3
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Whitman
Review Posted Online: Dec. 25, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2013
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