A lyrical and creative tale that brings ideas to vivid life.
A young girl must help magical creatures in Lynn’s debut middle-grade fantasy series starter.
Ethiopian-born Lyric Murphy has always had a good imagination, and Gran, the kind older woman that adopted her when she was a baby, loves to tell Lyric to follow her fantasies. However, other people aren’t as accepting of Lyric’s eccentricities. The girl has always felt somewhat alone, but the odd, black-and-gold–skinned little creatures she thought she imagined in the woods always kept her entertained. Now that Lyric is almost 13, she’s decided to put away childish things, but it doesn’t seem to be working—if the creatures in the shape of words that pop out of her book are anything to go by. Lyric is starting to suspect that she’s hallucinating until she’s enlisted to help the Bookmaker, a man whom she’d only heard about in her Gran’s stories. It turns out that two small but important words—Forsooth and Wherefore—have been kidnapped by an evil creature, and the Bookmaker needs Lyric’s help to get them back. Along the way, Lyric finds out just how magical the world truly is—and how important she herself is. Lynn offers a magical story that feels light and airy despite its deep worldbuilding. In its broadest strokes, this plot doesn’t feel very original, featuring a girl finding out she’s special and going on a magical quest. However, the world she inhabits includes characters that are essentially words with personalities, which adds a whimsical quality as well as complexity. The author particularly shines in her poetic descriptions of supernatural beings, which allow readers to easily envision even the oddest-looking ones: “The little creature was made almost entirely of small shells imbued with all the colors of the sea, from pale pink to sand to shades of gray and deep purples and browns. Each shell curved in a knobbly spiral, weathered and notched.” Readers will look forward to future installments, which will likely develop this complex world further.
A lyrical and creative tale that brings ideas to vivid life.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-1-03-913342-6
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: April 4, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Readers can still rely on this series to bring laughs.
The Heffley family’s house undergoes a disastrous attempt at home improvement.
When Great Aunt Reba dies, she leaves some money to the family. Greg’s mom calls a family meeting to determine what to do with their share, proposing home improvements and then overruling the family’s cartoonish wish lists and instead pushing for an addition to the kitchen. Before bringing in the construction crew, the Heffleys attempt to do minor maintenance and repairs themselves—during which Greg fails at the work in various slapstick scenes. Once the professionals are brought in, the problems keep getting worse: angry neighbors, terrifying problems in walls, and—most serious—civil permitting issues that put the kibosh on what work’s been done. Left with only enough inheritance to patch and repair the exterior of the house—and with the school’s dismal standardized test scores as a final straw—Greg’s mom steers the family toward moving, opening up house-hunting and house-selling storylines (and devastating loyal Rowley, who doesn’t want to lose his best friend). While Greg’s positive about the move, he’s not completely uncaring about Rowley’s action. (And of course, Greg himself is not as unaffected as he wishes.) The gags include effectively placed callbacks to seemingly incidental events (the “stress lizard” brought in on testing day is particularly funny) and a lampoon of after-school-special–style problem books. Just when it seems that the Heffleys really will move, a new sequence of chaotic trouble and property destruction heralds a return to the status quo. Whew.
Readers can still rely on this series to bring laughs. (Graphic/fiction hybrid. 8-12)Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-4197-3903-3
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Amulet/Abrams
Review Posted Online: Nov. 18, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
Renata’s wren encounter proves magical, one most children could only wish to experience outside of this lovely story.
A home-renovation project is interrupted by a family of wrens, allowing a young girl an up-close glimpse of nature.
Renata and her father enjoy working on upgrading their bathroom, installing a clawfoot bathtub, and cutting a space for a new window. One warm night, after Papi leaves the window space open, two wrens begin making a nest in the bathroom. Rather than seeing it as an unfortunate delay of their project, Renata and Papi decide to let the avian carpenters continue their work. Renata witnesses the birth of four chicks as their rosy eggs split open “like coats that are suddenly too small.” Renata finds at a crucial moment that she can help the chicks learn to fly, even with the bittersweet knowledge that it will only hasten their exits from her life. Rosen uses lively language and well-chosen details to move the story of the baby birds forward. The text suggests the strong bond built by this Afro-Latinx father and daughter with their ongoing project without needing to point it out explicitly, a light touch in a picture book full of delicate, well-drawn moments and precise wording. Garoche’s drawings are impressively detailed, from the nest’s many small bits to the developing first feathers on the chicks and the wall smudges and exposed wiring of the renovation. (This book was reviewed digitally with 10-by-20-inch double-page spreads viewed at actual size.)
Renata’s wren encounter proves magical, one most children could only wish to experience outside of this lovely story. (Picture book. 3-7)Pub Date: March 16, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-593-12320-1
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Schwartz & Wade/Random
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2021
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