Reiss’s deliciously creepy tale is a solid addition to the haunted dollhouse genre. When Zibby, under the influence of a compulsion not her own, buys an antique dollhouse on her 12th birthday, she finds herself caught up in a decades-old haunting: Primrose, the former owner of the dollhouse, is haunted by the controlling governess whose death Primrose caused as a child. Both dollhouse and doll representing cruel Miss Honeywell are tools by which the dead governess wields her revenge, and Zibby soon discovers that she and those around her are in danger. Chapters about Zibby as she tries to sort out the mystery are interspersed with ones about Primrose’s childhood under the thumb of “sweet” Miss Honeywell and her self-serving attempts as an adult to rid herself of haunted doll and dollhouse. As with most horror stories, it doesn’t do to examine the motives of the evil personae too closely. Reiss has reworked material from an earlier paperback series here, and the result, while a bit long, delivers a good dose of shivery entertainment. (Fiction. 11-14)
Pub Date: June 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-15-216574-6
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2004
Clever as ever—if slow off the mark—and positively laden with tics, quirks, and puns.
When deadly minions of archvillain Ledroptha Curtain escape from prison, the talented young protégés of his twin brother, Nicholas Benedict, reunite for a new round of desperate ploys and ingenious trickery.
Stewart sets the reunion of cerebral Reynie Muldoon Perumal, hypercapable Kate Wetherall, shy scientific genius George “Sticky” Washington, and spectacularly sullen telepath Constance Contraire a few years after the previous episode, The Mysterious Benedict Society and the Prisoner’s Dilemma (2009). Providing relief from the quartet’s continual internecine squabbling and self-analysis, he trucks in Tai Li, a grubby, precociously verbal 5-year-old orphan who also happens to be telepathic. (Just to even the playing field a bit, the bad guys get a telepath too.) Series fans will know to be patient in wading through all the angst, arguments, and flurries of significant nose-tapping (occasionally in unison), for when the main action does at long last get under way—the five don’t even set out from Mr. Benedict’s mansion together until more than halfway through—the Society returns to Nomansan Island (get it?), the site of their first mission, for chases, narrow squeaks, hastily revised stratagems, and heroic exploits that culminate in a characteristically byzantine whirl of climactic twists, triumphs, and revelations. Except for brown-skinned George and olive-complected, presumably Asian-descended Tai, the central cast defaults to white; Reynie’s adoptive mother is South Asian.
Clever as ever—if slow off the mark—and positively laden with tics, quirks, and puns. (Fiction. 11-13)Pub Date: Sept. 24, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-316-45264-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Megan Tingley/Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: April 27, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The author of The Deep Freeze of Bartholomew Tullock (2008) again wastes a promising premise on a tale shot through with weak logic, wooden dialogue and inconsistent characterizations. Having recruited a creature who can extract and absorb the special qualities of others, villainous mediocrity Fortescue has set out to rob all the human prodigies of the world—somehow persuading his monster to hand over the talents (which resemble Easter eggs when drawn from their owners’ heads) rather than consume them itself. This nefarious scheme is dealt a severe setback when the creature deprives sulky teenager Cressida Bloom of her extraordinary singing voice, and Cressida’s astonishingly thick-skinned, supposedly no-talent little brother Adam sets out to get it back. Along the way Adam collects two of Fortescue’s adult victims, whose budding romance provides a welcome distraction from the lumbering plot and meant-to-be-funny-but-not lines like, “You make me feel strangely uneasy, as if I’ve just eaten a moldy sandwich and I’m waiting for the ill effects to kick in.” With massive reworking, the film version, purportedly in the early stages of development, might be salvageable. (Fantasy. 11-13)
Pub Date: June 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-399-25278-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Philomel
Review Posted Online: Jan. 21, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
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