An original fantasy with warrior rabbits, fierce foes, sibling loyalty, riveting adventure, and genuine storytelling.
A traveling bard tells the story of how legendary warrior rabbit Podkin lost his ear and confronted the treacherous Gorm.
When rabbits walked upright and lived in elaborate underground villages, Podkin “was perhaps the laziest, most spoiled son of a chieftain in the whole Five Realms.” One Bramblemas Eve, the Gorm—mutant, evil, iron-infused, red-eyed rabbits—invade Munbury Warren searching for Starclaw, a magical knife. While the Gorm murder his father, Podkin flees with his sister, brother, and Starclaw. With the Gorm in pursuit, the siblings barely escape (Podkin sacrificing his ear in the process) and are rescued by an ancient rabbit healer/seer who seems to know everything about them. She sends them to an underground warren of other refugees from the Gorm, where they find allies, but can Podkin, now chieftain of Munbury Warren, hope to avenge his father and rescue his mother from the seemingly invincible Gorm? An omniscient third-person narrator speaks directly to readers, inviting them to listen to the mysterious storyteller who relates Podkin’s gripping tale in language replete with amusing asides, rabbit lore, stories within stories, and a curious insider perspective. Realistic black-and-white illustrations highlight dramatic scenes.
An original fantasy with warrior rabbits, fierce foes, sibling loyalty, riveting adventure, and genuine storytelling. (map) (Animal fantasy. 10-12)Pub Date: Sept. 5, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-328-69582-6
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Clarion Books
Review Posted Online: June 18, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2017
Echoes of Peter Pan notwithstanding, a less-than-seaworthy outing.
Endowed with the trappings of a comedic pirate yarn but not its heart, this series opener focuses more on one character’s soul-searching than nautical action.
Hardly has sheltered young “Old Worlder” Jem arrived on tropical islands believed to be haunted by the ghosts of exterminated natives than he is kidnapped by genteel pirates led by a grandiose pipsqueak. He is then rescued by the Lost Souls—an unwashed crew of orphans and runaways (all 13 or younger) sailing the supposed ghost ship Margaret’s Hop (the terminal “e” having been lost in the past) under the command of fiery but insecure Capt. Scarlet McCray. Guided by a map that belonged to his vanished uncle and pursued by the aforementioned pirates, Jem and the Lost Souls set out to find a fabled treasure. The search, however, proves little more than a vehicle for Scarlet’s continual second-guessing as she frets about being a proper, “captainly” leader and struggles to keep the Lost Souls entertained and a rebellious crew member in line. In the wake of numerous contrived obstacles overcome, the sudden re-emergence of Scarlet’s suppressed awareness that she’s half-Islander serves as a more sharply felt (if, at least for readers, not particularly cogent) climax than the discovery of the “treasure.” This turns out to be a glade so mystically peaceful that the fact that it’s surrounded by birds’ nests full of rubies comes across as just a nice added feature.
Echoes of Peter Pan notwithstanding, a less-than-seaworthy outing. (map, glossary) (Adventure. 10-12)Pub Date: July 5, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-448-45776-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Grosset & Dunlap
Review Posted Online: May 1, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2012
Labored and wrapped in a thin film of artificial drama as it is, this set of mind-expanding if scattershot exposures to some...
Like their first two collaborations, the Hawkings’ third and final George book offers a hybrid mixture of made-up adventures in space/time interleaved with miniessays on, as one character unoriginally puts it, “life, the Universe, and everything.”
Most of the action centers on Switzerland’s Large Hadron Collider, where the Order of Science to Benefit Humanity has gathered. The anti-environmentalist group Theory of Everything Resists Addition of Gravity (aka TOERAG, a tortured joke that American readers will miss) have planted a “quantum mechanical bomb” there, with a trigger that, quantum-theory style, remains indeterminate until it’s observed. Meanwhile, though conveniently provided with a defusing code, young George and Annie have been imprisoned in an Inverse Schrödinger Trap (with a cat, of course) that will assume a random and therefore almost certainly deadly location somewhere in the universe should they try to leave. The story is interspersed with suitably seriocomic illustrations and pauses every few pages for digestible disquisitions (some by prominent scientists other than Hawking) on the Big Bang, wormholes, Feynman diagrams, major components of the LHC and other topics in Newtonian, quantum and theoretical physics. It is less a single plot than a weakly connected chain of incidents, fetching up where it should in the end.
Labored and wrapped in a thin film of artificial drama as it is, this set of mind-expanding if scattershot exposures to some of science’s biggest theories and ideas will once again find a large audience thanks more to its celebrity co-author than its content. (Science fiction/informational hybrid. 10-12)Pub Date: Aug. 28, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4424-4005-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 1, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2012
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