A decent finish featuring plenty of action and lots of dinos—the latter furnishing not only thrills, but both bacon and eggs...
Sky’s search for her long-missing father becomes a race against time following the discovery of a scheme to reclaim Earth’s surface from the resurgent dinosaurs—with nukes.
Rightly thinking that the environmental effects of a nuclear apocalypse would wipe out the last surviving remnants of humanity too, Sky leads a seemingly quixotic attempt to infect the tech of the plan’s brutal but charismatic architect, a political boss known as “the Noah,” with toxic software. But getting to his headquarters beneath shattered New York’s Grand Central Station requires making her way through multiple betrayals, shootings, subway tunnels, firefights, and explosions. And that’s not to mention the frequent, terrifying (if low on explicit gore) encounters with hosts of prehistoric creatures—from Dracorex hogwartsia and rhinolike pentaceratops to predatory carnotaurus, plesiosaurs, condorraptors, and troodons. Red-haired, white Sky needs rescuing a little too often this time around to come off quite as tough and resilient as in the opening episode, and like allies Shawn (the brilliant white hacker) and Todd (the hunky white survivalist), those around her are by and large typecast sorts.
A decent finish featuring plenty of action and lots of dinos—the latter furnishing not only thrills, but both bacon and eggs for a closing breakfast. (afterword) (Science fiction. 11-13)Pub Date: May 30, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-06-241625-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Jan. 31, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
The author of Bran Hambric: The Fairfield Curse (2009) dishes up an equally maladroit sequel featuring the same sort of nonsensical plot, clumsy satirical elements and ham-fisted writing. Tucking in lines like, “It knew his name, which was enough to send terror through his skin,” and, “the creature leapt forward, striking his finger with her teeth,” Nation sends his young wizard-in-training on a rescue mission after a mysterious Key left him by his dead mother explodes with magic one random night and sucks the soul of his best friend/main squeeze Astara into a trap (her corpse conveniently disappears from its buried coffin some time later). Joined along the way by his previously unknown father and a Tinkerbell-style vampire fairy with obscure loyalties and motives, Bran eventually finds and destroys the trap (and the Key—supposedly, that is) in the sort of running battle with the mage who killed his mother that pauses while he dives into a lake to rescue the miraculously alive Astara and ends with everyone pretty much back where they started, poised for the next episode. Not a stand-alone, or, for that matter, a stand-at-all. (Fantasy. 11-13)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4022-4059-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Sourcebooks Jabberwocky
Review Posted Online: Aug. 31, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
Stewart and Riddell cap their Edge Chronicles with a large-scale grand tour and cast reunion. Several generations after the events in Freeglader (2004), young orphan Nate Quarter is forced to flee for his life from a murderous mine supervisor—which becomes more or less a theme as, acquiring such doughty companions as the mine owner’s intrepid daughter Eudoxia and Librarian Knight Zelphyius Dax along the way, he comes and goes from Great Glade and several other cities or settlements that have grown up in the vast Deep Woods that border the overhanging Edge of the world. The long journey takes him through multiple battles, chases, rescues and political upheavals to mystical encounters with figures from the past in the ever-dark Night Woods and then on to a climax in the restored airborne city of Sanctaphrax. A huge cast teeming with multiple races of uneasily coexistent goblins, trolls and more, plus Dementor-ish gloamglozers and other deadly predators are all depicted in lovingly minute (and occasionally gruesome) detail in Riddell’s many pen-and-ink portraits and add plenty of color to this vigorous sendoff. (Fantasy. 11-13)
Pub Date: Sept. 14, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-375-83743-2
Page Count: 688
Publisher: David Fickling/Random
Review Posted Online: July 15, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2010
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