It's time for the Dream Horse to die.
It is. The Dream Horse is an archetype distressingly common in children's literature, spawning awful books like this one for generations of obsessed little riders. Young teen Sarah Wagner is a Talented Horseless Rider who, through the interventions of an Amazingly Kind Adult, is gifted with a choice of four horses just off the track. The one she picks, a gelding of remarkable, valuable breeding who never raced because he is so poorly behaved under saddle (a fantastic choice for a kid!), is immediately found to have a reversible medical condition (somehow missed by the track vets) that will made him tractable. A real, honest teenager would at this point immediately return the horse for one of the others—his racing career is presumably restored, and since she's only owned the horse one day and never ridden him, he's the equal to her of the others. But no. This is a Dream Horse. Our Heroine must throw temper tantrums until she can keep the horse; the adults, instead of counseling her toward appropriate moral behavior, applaud her Loyalty and Perseverance. There's also a Poor Little Rich Girl, a Stalwart Friend, an Irascible Groom and a Token Boy Rider. Despite the liberal use of tropes, far too much of the prose is unnecessary, laborious detail. Worse, it's first in a series. (Fiction. 10-13)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-57076-546-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Trafalgar Square
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2012
Narrator Olivia and her friends Delia, Mandy, Phoebe and Joey are Hubert C. Frost Middle School's “Marcies”—losers. Reigning...
In a high-concept approach to middle-school hierarchies, a group of unpopular eighth graders uses dog-training techniques to combat bullies.
Narrator Olivia and her friends Delia, Mandy, Phoebe and Joey are Hubert C. Frost Middle School's “Marcies”—losers. Reigning mean girl Brynne Shawnson and her cronies constantly target them with pranks and ridicule their acne, ill-fitting clothes, infected eyebrow piercing and other traits both real and invented. While helping her dog-trainer grandmother rehabilitate a grass-phobic Mexican Hairless, Olivia hatches her plan. She and her friends launch a three-stage training operation that involves distractions, rewards and ignoring negative behaviors. As the middle-school social order re-forms itself in both predictable and unpredictable ways, Olivia struggles with abandonment and shame about her mother, who has left home for a mental facility. Although the therapist Olivia sees is so ineffectual as to be off-putting rather than comic, Olivia's warm and charmingly self-deprecating narrative voice relates her feelings with a surprising and touching expressiveness. The comparison between dogs and people often feels apt, though it is occasionally carried too far—it's a bit disconcerting to hear Olivia liken her crush to a chocolate Lab, for example, and the notion that ignoring bullies' negative behavior will make them stop seems sadly optimistic.Pub Date: Nov. 8, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-4231-3845-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Disney-Hyperion
Review Posted Online: Sept. 6, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Action and enthusiasm aplenty, but, like most time-travel tales, not much for internal logic.
A Back to the Future–style romp through time, though with more loose ends than a bowl of spaghetti.
Hardly have teen twins Kyle and Emma and their younger brother (and narrator) Max arrived for a stay at their reclusive grandfather’s Texas ranch than the old man announces that he’s about to have a massive heart attack, shows them a working time machine in the basement and sends them out to a nearby paleontological site where they find fossilized sneaker prints among the dinosaur tracks. Then a stranger grabs Emma and vanishes in a flash of light—leaving the remaining sibs and a ranch hand’s bow-wielding daughter Petra to zoom in a Volkswagen Beetle back 70 million–plus years to the rescue. Not only does the late Cretaceous landscape turn out to be well stocked with crocodilian Deinosuchus and other toothy predators, a human gent falsely (as it turns out) claiming to be a refugee from 1919 steps out of the bushes to guide the others to the evidently dino-proof frame house in which Emma is being held. Everyone steams back to the present on the kidnapper’s motor launch, which is also fitted out as a time machine. Showing blithe disregard for potential paradoxes, the author sheds enough light on his byzantine back story to ensure that the protagonists will be taking more trips through time and closes with notes on dinosaurs and on the history of “Robinsonades.”
Action and enthusiasm aplenty, but, like most time-travel tales, not much for internal logic. (recommended reading) (Science fiction. 10-12)Pub Date: March 20, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-547-60849-5
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Clarion Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 8, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2011
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