Associations aside, a chromatic fantasy full of panache and a clever sense of fun.
A heavenly blue horse introduces a young girl to a land of merriment that finds itself besieged by serpents and Kermudgins.
Turner Flint discovers a rather magical creature among her collection of horse figurines: Glory, guardian of the morning glory vine, a horse that attains the dimensions of a real horse when night comes, and ferries Turner to magical Joya. This land is perfect, “but its seemingly crazy arrangement of beauty was in danger of being straightened.” Winding lanes and serpentine brooks would be chastened by “a terrible tribe of tidy-uppers” called the Kermudgins, currently on a march through Joya. These plug-uglies are greed-heads who like things nice, neat and without smell (though they possess an alarming flatulence of their own), and who, in a pleasing contemporary touch, bear a sound resemblance to your neighborhood developer and his spate of McMansions. Turner and Glory assemble a motley crew of Joyans–Mud-Dog, Rose Falcon, Ole Beaver, Stripe-ed Bees (“What is our bussssinessss of assssissstance?”) and a Pink Cloud–to battle the Kermudgins and the hideous serpent Armanget, spookily captured in one of Lippincott’s two dozen, fine-lined drawings. Chester’s tale displays a good collection of original characters and a disarmingly frank and flawed heroine, as well as a comical fantasyland that, despite its appeal, will make readers think twice about living in a place that values hilarity above all else. Chester maintains just enough menace and hard twists of fate to keep things interesting but not morbid. On the other hand, there are some serious echoes here, loud as church bells, of another land called Oz. In the correspondence of fantasy and real characters at story’s end, the very Munchkin-like Pansies (“Personally, I found them a little bit tiresome,” says Turner) and in the woeful updating of the ruby slippers as a pair of Adidas sneakers.
Associations aside, a chromatic fantasy full of panache and a clever sense of fun.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-1-59543-616-0
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Bishop’s spectacular photographs of the tiny red-eyed tree frog defeat an incidental text from Cowley (Singing Down the Rain, 1997, etc.). The frog, only two inches long, is enormous in this title; it appears along with other nocturnal residents of the rain forests of Central America, including the iguana, ant, katydid, caterpillar, and moth. In a final section, Cowley explains how small the frog is and aspects of its life cycle. The main text, however, is an afterthought to dramatic events in the photos, e.g., “But the red-eyed tree frog has been asleep all day. It wakes up hungry. What will it eat? Here is an iguana. Frogs do not eat iguanas.” Accompanying an astonishing photograph of the tree frog leaping away from a boa snake are three lines (“The snake flicks its tongue. It tastes frog in the air. Look out, frog!”) that neither advance nor complement the action. The layout employs pale and deep green pages and typeface, and large jewel-like photographs in which green and red dominate. The combination of such visually sophisticated pages and simplistic captions make this a top-heavy, unsatisfying title. (Picture book. 7-9)
Pub Date: March 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-590-87175-7
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Scholastic
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1999
Themes of freedom and responsibility twine between the lines of this short but heavy novel from the author of Because of Winn-Dixie (2000). Three months after his mother's death, Rob and his father are living in a small-town Florida motel, each nursing sharp, private pain. On the same day Rob has two astonishing encounters: first, he stumbles upon a caged tiger in the woods behind the motel; then he meets Sistine, a new classmate responding to her parents' breakup with ready fists and a big chip on her shoulder. About to burst with his secret, Rob confides in Sistine, who instantly declares that the tiger must be freed. As Rob quickly develops a yen for Sistine's company that gives her plenty of emotional leverage, and the keys to the cage almost literally drop into his hands, credible plotting plainly takes a back seat to character delineation here. And both struggle for visibility beneath a wagonload of symbol and metaphor: the real tiger (and the inevitable recitation of Blake's poem); the cage; Rob's dream of Sistine riding away on the beast's back; a mysterious skin condition on Rob's legs that develops after his mother's death; a series of wooden figurines that he whittles; a larger-than-life African-American housekeeper at the motel who dispenses wisdom with nearly every utterance; and the climax itself, which is signaled from the start. It's all so freighted with layers of significance that, like Lois Lowry's Gathering Blue (2000), Anne Mazer's Oxboy (1995), or, further back, Julia Cunningham's Dorp Dead (1965), it becomes more an exercise in analysis than a living, breathing story. Still, the tiger, "burning bright" with magnificent, feral presence, does make an arresting central image. (Fiction. 10-12)
Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-7636-0911-0
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Candlewick
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2001
BOOK TO SCREEN
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