An imaginative fable about two witches that should excite young readers.
A children’s tale that reveals a little girl’s travails combines suspense, fantasy, and some dark fears.
Hadley Brighton’s parents decide to take a 10-day cruise, leaving the girl under the supervision of a high school–aged babysitter, Zoe. One day, an old woman named Maxine Grimm arrives unannounced, claiming to be Hadley’s great-aunt, a revelation of sorts because Hadley is sure she has never heard of her. Maxine informs Hadley that her parents’ ship capsized, the two are lost at sea, and in the interim she plans to take Hadley to her own home, where she lives with her younger sister, Charmaine. Terrified at the prospect that her parents are gone forever, Hadley reluctantly leaves with Maxine and is quickly subjected to an oddly regimented schedule that essentially reduces her to the role of a housekeeper. She spends the bulk of her day completing chores—mostly cleaning duties the aunts consider so grotesque as to be beneath them—and her aunts actually compel Hadley to dance for her supper. She turns out to be a precociously gifted dancer. Hadley becomes reasonably suspicious of her aunts, not merely because of their virtual enslavement of her and their general oddness, but also because they seem cruelly dismissive of her understandably persistent interest in her parents’ fate. Then Hadley hears a rumbling in an oversized dustbin the aunts inexplicably keep, and a talking beetle discloses that they are actually witches who intend to suck out her talent, as they have done to so many children before: “Anyhow, they did their talent every night for the witches, and then one night—poof! All that was left was ashes. And then the witches sweep up the ashes and put them in the bin.” Hadley has no choice but to craft a plan to escape the Grimm House before she becomes yet another victim of Maxine and Charmaine. Written for young children, this brief story artfully combines magical flights from reality, an endearing touch of sweetness, and some genuinely creepy material still appropriate for a younger reader. It’s unclear why parents would leave a child with a teenager for 10 days or why that babysitter would so easily surrender her charge to a stranger, but these wrinkles in the plot never diminish its overall charm. McQuestion (Write That Novel!, 2016, etc.), who has written two other books for younger readers, has produced a delightful tale for children to peruse or for parents to read to their kids.
An imaginative fable about two witches that should excite young readers.Pub Date: Nov. 14, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-9864164-6-0
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Nightsky Press
Review Posted Online: June 14, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
An entrancing book of poetry.
Ungar’s (English/Coll. of Saint Rose; The Origin of the Milky Way, 2007, etc.) new collection may not make her immortal, but it surely establishes her as a contemporary poet of the first rank.
This poetry collection is like a bowl of fruit and cream: it’s so delicious, and it all goes down so easily, that you forget how much nutrition is there. She’s also the rare talent who can take nearly anything and make it into poetry. Everything is ore for her refinery, and she pulls inspiration from numerous and sundry sources, from the natural world to mystical Judaism to an exercise class for the elderly to a student’s essay. (The author is a writing professor.) This last source fuels “On a Student Paper Comparing Emily Dickinson to Lady Gaga,” a poem that no one should ever have tried to write—and that Ungar turns to gold. This clever piece demonstrates the author’s slow turn from skeptical distance to full acceptance of her young author’s thesis; it concludes, “Should I google Lady Gaga? / Or just give the girl an A.” This collection is full of such unlikely experiments—all of which the author pulls off with easy grace. Two poems with “Medusa” in their titles show her admirable dexterity with symbols. The first, “Call Me Medusa,” takes the snake-haired sorceress as a metaphor for the author herself: “I was a brain, eyes and hair. / If not a beauty, are you then a monster? / Some say I was beautiful, raped, punished / for it, then beheaded in a rear-view mirror. / Even cut off, my head could still turn men / to stone.” The second, a poem that gives the collection its title, compares tiny jellyfish to the same mythic figure: “Tentacles resorb, / umbrella reverts, / medusa reattaches / to the ocean floor / and grows a new / colony of polyps / that bud into / identical medusae, / bypassing death.” Thus, Medusa is human and other, dead and deathless, beautiful and terrible and strange.
An entrancing book of poetry.Pub Date: April 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-915380-93-0
Page Count: 98
Publisher: The Word Works
Review Posted Online: Aug. 24, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A flimsy narrative and excessive scatology.
In Matvejs’ novel, a performer with a traveling circus in the Australian Outback tries to keep her family together in the face of intimidating difficulties.
Rose Vitkovskis loves her life in the circus, despite all its hardships: little money, a sleazy boss pressuring her for sex, constant travel through dusty, dying mining towns, bad weather, etc. Mother of five, she also cares for her much older husband, who has dementia, though she’s in love with a married circus clown. It’s all worth it once she gets in the ring, where she performs on the Spanish web and shows off her trained animals. But when a severe storm scatters the troupe, Rose must rise to a new set of challenges. Though Rose continually refers to the wonder and magic of her profession—her “one passion,” per the title—no book could better cure the reader of a desire to run away and join the circus. Its marvels are asserted but thinly described; instead, the book devotes space to supposedly funny episodes involving a quantity and variety of excrement that readers might not believe possible. Toilets, farts, urine, vomit; feces from human, pig, parrot, horse, goose, monkey, dog; the senile old lady repeating “Piss…piss…piss” and “Chamber pot!”—it never ends. When not playing for laughs, it’s for humiliation, as when Rose is made to scrub some filthy toilets while wearing her circus costume in view of laughing local teenagers. Leaving aside bodily waste, it’s also disturbing to see Rose enjoying her sexual exploitation as she responds to her boss’ “ultimate dominance.” The disgusting elements make it more than a little difficult to buy high-flown statements about wonder and magic and how the real world is a nothing but a jail. Similarly, it’s difficult to buy into the thwarted romance between Rose and Freddy, a circus clown. “It’s the circus that protects our love, isn’t it?” she says. “Beyond this world around the big top, our love could never be.” There’s no such thing as divorce? More unbelievable yet is Rose’s fate after returning to civilization, which involves a naked wish-fulfillment fantasy about her journal being made into a movie.
A flimsy narrative and excessive scatology.Pub Date: Feb. 7, 2012
ISBN: 978-1434911261
Page Count: 316
Publisher: Dorrance Publishing Co.
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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