A hero breaks the mold in this inventive and energetic series installment.
This third volume of a YA series sees a boy’s mortal friend trapped in hell.
Eighth grader Philip Engel once trained to replace Lucifer as ruler of hell. Now, after succeeding in an adventure that extended his mother’s life, he’s begun to focus more on his mortal circle and less on his periodic trips to the dangerous underworld. His friendship with Sabrina, a classmate crush, is blossoming. One day, they paint props together for a school play. When she spills paint all over herself, Philip fails to connect her unnatural clumsiness to the antics of Satina, his tempter friend from hell, who is jealous. Later, as school ends, he feels an intense pain. He discovers that Sam, a former bully and current friend, took a “summoning pill” from his belongings, mistaking it for a pain reliever. Sam has been transported to hell, and Philip has no choice but to take the second of two pills and follow him. Once there, Philip reunites with Satina and her father, Blackhorn. He learns that Sam’s mortal transgressions might place him at any number of punishment venues. More alarmingly, someone altered Sam’s Soul Book. And he and Philip are no longer friends, but enemies once again. In this latest volume of this dark and clever series, Andersen’s hero acknowledges that hell “is repetition.” Nevertheless, the author’s eerie atmospherics prove a continuous wonder, as in the description of “ink-black trees with thorns as long and sharp as daggers.” The adventure, translated from the Danish by Todd, also opens up in ways only teased previously, as when Philip visits paradise and meets Jehovah. Humor remains vital to the narrative, as when God warns Philip about using a chair Jesus built: “Miracles, he can manage those, but carpentry was never his strong point.” Philip’s budding romance with Satina and the possibility of meeting his father, Victor, expand the hero’s arc. The notion that Aziel, Philip’s nemesis, is building an army of those who want revenge on Lucifer—who made everyone in hell mortal—raises the stakes and will have fans clamoring for the next volume.
A hero breaks the mold in this inventive and energetic series installment.Pub Date: March 19, 2020
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: April 2, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Ebulliently original.
Who can't love a story about a Nigerian-American 12-year-old with albinism who discovers latent magical abilities and saves the world?
Sunny lives in Nigeria after spending the first nine years of her life in New York. She can't play soccer with the boys because, as she says, "being albino made the sun my enemy," and she has only enemies at school. When a boy in her class, Orlu, rescues her from a beating, Sunny is drawn in to a magical world she's never known existed. Sunny, it seems, is a Leopard person, one of the magical folk who live in a world mostly populated by ignorant Lambs. Now she spends the day in mundane Lamb school and sneaks out at night to learn magic with her cadre of Leopard friends: a handsome American bad boy, an arrogant girl who is Orlu’s childhood friend and Orlu himself. Though Sunny's initiative is thin—she is pushed into most of her choices by her friends and by Leopard adults—the worldbuilding for Leopard society is stellar, packed with details that will enthrall readers bored with the same old magical worlds. Meanwhile, those looking for a touch of the familiar will find it in Sunny's biggest victories, which are entirely non-magical (the detailed dynamism of Sunny's soccer match is more thrilling than her magical world saving).
Ebulliently original. (Fantasy. 11-13)Pub Date: April 14, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-670-01196-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2011
A trilogy opener both rich and strange, if heavy at the front end.
Riggs spins a gothic tale of strangely gifted children and the monsters that pursue them from a set of eerie, old trick photographs.
The brutal murder of his grandfather and a glimpse of a man with a mouth full of tentacles prompts months of nightmares and psychotherapy for 15-year-old Jacob, followed by a visit to a remote Welsh island where, his grandfather had always claimed, there lived children who could fly, lift boulders and display like weird abilities. The stories turn out to be true—but Jacob discovers that he has unwittingly exposed the sheltered “peculiar spirits” (of which he turns out to be one) and their werefalcon protector to a murderous hollowgast and its shape-changing servant wight. The interspersed photographs—gathered at flea markets and from collectors—nearly all seem to have been created in the late 19th or early 20th centuries and generally feature stone-faced figures, mostly children, in inscrutable costumes and situations. They are seen floating in the air, posing with a disreputable-looking Santa, covered in bees, dressed in rags and kneeling on a bomb, among other surreal images. Though Jacob’s overdeveloped back story gives the tale a slow start, the pictures add an eldritch element from the early going, and along with creepy bad guys, the author tucks in suspenseful chases and splashes of gore as he goes. He also whirls a major storm, flying bullets and a time loop into a wild climax that leaves Jacob poised for the sequel.
A trilogy opener both rich and strange, if heavy at the front end. (Horror/fantasy. 12-14)Pub Date: June 7, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-59474-476-1
Page Count: 234
Publisher: Quirk Books
Review Posted Online: March 30, 2014
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