Tender and magical.
Wynn is a sweet-natured 11-year-old with physical and mental challenges that have caused her to be labeled a changeling and hidden away with her mother in a lonely hut far from the serfs’ village.
When Wynn’s mother dies, her father plans to sell the dark-haired white girl to the lord of the manor as a kitchen slave. Her older brother, Elric, loves her, but he is conflicted about his role as her protector, for he cannot always understand or meet her needs. He makes the difficult decision to take Wynn away and find her a safe home. Their journey through the medieval-ish landscape is fraught with danger from the elements and also from superstitious, often vicious inhabitants (most evidently white and with Saxon names). Even in the darkest moments Wynn sees magical omens linked to a mysterious song she learned from her mother, and she truly believes that they will find the titular silver gate, leading to the world of the dark-brown–skinned Fairy Queen. When Elric finally allows himself to believe as she does, they find more than safety. As conveyed in a third-person narration that occasionally shifts perspective from Elric to Wynn, the adventure is exciting, and the denouement is touching. Bailey explains Wynn’s very real genetic syndrome at the beginning rather than at the end of the work, perhaps indicating a lack of trust that readers will love Wynn and understand that she is wise and capable.
Tender and magical. (Fantasy. 8-12)Pub Date: Jan. 10, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-06-239857-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Katherine Tegen/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Sept. 18, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
Another stellar lap—readers will be eager to see who’s next
African-American track phenom Patina Jones takes the baton from Ghost (2016) in the second volume of Reynolds’ Track series for middle graders.
Reynolds tells readers almost all they need to know about Patty in two opening, contrasting scenes. In the first, Patty misjudges her competitors in an 800-meter race she’s certain she should have won. Running well but second is not enough for the ferociously competitive Patty. In the other, she braids her little sister’s hair before church, finishing off each of Maddy’s 30 braids with three beads. She does this every Sunday because their white adoptive mother can’t (“there ain’t no rule book for white people to know how to work with black hair”) and because their birth mother insists they look their best for church. Their father dead and their birth mother’s legs lost to diabetes, the two girls live with their father’s brother and his wife, seeing their mother once a week in an arrangement that’s as imperfect as it is loving and necessary. Writing in Patty’s voice, Reynolds creates a fully dimensional, conflicted character whose hard-earned pragmatism helps her bring her relay team together, negotiate the social dynamics of the all-girls, mostly white private school she attends, and make the best of her unusual family lot. When this last is threatened, readers will ache right alongside her.
Another stellar lap—readers will be eager to see who’s next . (Fiction. 8-12)Pub Date: Aug. 29, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-4814-5018-8
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Caitlyn Dlouhy/Atheneum
Review Posted Online: July 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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