The author’s consistent habit of freezing attacks for exchanges of threats or banter turns most of the action scenes into...
Set in an alternate 1941 in which there’s no world war and humans share the world with hordes of imps, trolls, shapechangers, gods and every other type of creature that Yep can conjure from world mythology, this opener to a planned City Trilogy pits a squad of unlikely allies against bad guys with a shadowy but ominous agenda.
Banding together after surviving an evil dragon’s smash-and-grab theft of an ancient artifact from a San Francisco museum, young orphan Leech joins belligerent preteen aristocrat Scirye, along with Bayang (a dragon in disguise) and two other nonhuman sidekicks in a long chase to Hawaii—where, with help from the volcano goddess Pele, they barely escape a tsunami-sized trap as the villains wing away with a second artifact. The chase goes on, heading for the icy North.
The author’s consistent habit of freezing attacks for exchanges of threats or banter turns most of the action scenes into leisurely set pieces, but such scenes follow one another in quick succession in this plot-driven tale, and the cast is as engaging as it is diverse. (Fantasy. 10-12)Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-7653-1924-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Starscape/Tom Doherty
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Wooden dialogue, weak storytelling and a slow start consign this promisingly premised fantasy to the status of an also-ran. Blind in one eye and lame since birth, ten-year-old Wat is considered Devil’s Spawn by his fellow villagers and fair game for the local bullies. He retains enough spirit, however, to steal a pair of newly captured nestling peregrines from his hated Norman overlord. Running off into the forest, he encounters Griswold, an old man who not only turns out to be his grandfather, but as a guardian of the forest possesses enhanced senses and magical abilities. Uttering many lines like “We walk and dance with nature, staying within the natural order of things to maintain the balance and preserve the patterns of life,” he proceeds to bring out those senses in Wat. By the time the falcons have fledged, Wat is able to transform himself into a bird of prey powerful enough to drive the overlord’s cruel Forester away. Weak both in atmosphere and in chemistry between the characters, this debut takes a back seat to such similar tales as Jane Yolen’s “Young Merlin” trilogy. Sequels may be on the way: don’t wait up for them. (Fiction. 10-12)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-525-46993-1
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2003
Hopping aboard the bandwagon behind its predecessor, Measle and the Wrathmonk (2004), this Brit-flavored burlesque pits young Measle Stubbs and his doughty little dog Tinker against a crew of wildly inept wrathmonks, or wizards-gone-to-the-bad, led by the last of the dragon-riding, long-ago-defeated Dragondons. Measle’s Mom being a rare reservoir of magical “mana,” the Dragodon has her snatched, intending to use her power to raise up his immense, dormant dragon and escape his underground prison. Pocketing some magic jellybeans, off hies Measle to the rescue, led by a convenient clue to a shutdown amusement park where drawn-out, increasingly large-scale chases and battles await, before the requisite escape and the dealing out of appropriate comeuppances. Thickly padded with repetitive slapstick scenes of the cardboard villains displaying their stupidity and explaining their intentions at length, this pedestrian knockoff makes stale reading next to the better imagined fantasies of Debi Gliori, Lemony Snicket, or just about anyone else. (Fantasy. 10-12)
Pub Date: April 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-06-058688-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
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