A charming tale that balances feeling classic and fresh.
Following Crumbled (2019), a second outing for fairy-tale mystery-solver Nobbin, Prince Charming’s assistant.
Though Nobbin’s entertained by Prince Charming’s prince lessons, Charming’s younger sister, Princess Angelica, bores quickly of being a damsel stand-in, asking hard-hitting questions like: If a prince climbs a damsel’s hair to get up a tower, “how can he carry her and still use her hair to climb down?” In response to her tomboyish ways, the sinister adviser to the king (a guy so sketchy that the characters, when suspecting him of villainy, ask if he is “suspicious suspicious? Or just his everyday suspicious?”) hatches a scheme to have her schooled in courtly manners by Queen Ermintrude, who promptly arrives with her son, Prince Figbert, to take her away. Nobbin and company try to help Angelica maintain her comportment while rotten Figbert baits her with aggressive rudeness. The arrangement falls apart when the contract’s fine print calls for a royal betrothal, Angelica proclaiming she “would rather kiss a frog.” When Figbert turns into a frog overnight, Nobbin leads the charge to find the culprit and a way to restore Figbert. There’s a secondary mystery about the queen’s motivations (and missing valuables). Both gently humorous gender and genre critiques and delightful language and wordplay elevate plotlines. Each chapter opens with a full-page illustration (in grayscale and, fittingly, green), and vignettes further decorate the pages. Characters default to White.
A charming tale that balances feeling classic and fresh. (Fantasy. 8-12)Pub Date: Aug. 25, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-4998-0973-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Yellow Jacket
Review Posted Online: June 29, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2020
Budding heroes defeat class and gender expectations as well as the occasional monster in this wry outing.
Thinking that it’s better to be fake knights than real peasants, Tim and his best buddy, Belinda, sign up to rescue a captured princess.
Unaware that they’ve been snookered into a dastardly scheme, the two youngsters hear that Princess Grace from the next kingdom over has been carried off in the claws of a fearsome and funky “stinx” and volunteer to accompany (reputedly) brave and noble Prince Ruprecht and his (reputedly) powerful magician Nerlim on a rescue mission. Accompanied by village idiot Ferkle, whose habit of shoving mud in his pants effectively lowers the level of humor even further, the two ersatz knights weather the Forest of Doom, the River of Doom, and a “troll bridge” across the Chasm of Doom despite a suspicious lack of assistance from either the prince or the magician…and arrive to discover that neither the stinx nor the princess is quite as expected either. In fact, the princess ends up being the rescuer (“That’s what you call irony,” she comments) when Ruprecht and Nerlim announce their intention to seize her and do away with any inconvenient witnesses. Tim and Belinda are rewarded with promotions for their efforts; readers will come away with both a cogent warning from Gibbs about the dangers of falling for fake news and better vocabularies due to his penchant for flagging significant words like gullible and malodorous in the narrative and then pausing to define and use them in sample sentences. Along with a full-spread map, Curtis supplies frequent pen-and-ink sketches of the cast in comical poses and straits. The races and ethnicities of the characters are not specified in the text, though cover art depicts characters of various skin tones.
Budding heroes defeat class and gender expectations as well as the occasional monster in this wry outing. (Fantasy. 8-12)Pub Date: March 1, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-5344-9925-6
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: April 12, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Imaginative, fast-paced, and fun.
Character Indira Story lives in the fictional town of Origin and aspires to a plot of her own.
She works hard to make her dream come true: to travel to the city of Fable and attend Protagonist Preparatory, a school where famous characters such as Alice (from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland), Fitzwilliam Darcy, and Romeo Montague train aspirants to become successful characters in actual stories. Ultimately, succeeding at Protagonist Preparatory would result in Indira’s being chosen by an Author in the Real World for their novel. Indira is determined to become a protagonist so that she can find her brother, David, a laborer in the town of Quiver, where he mines story nuggets. However, Indira fails her audition and begins to train as a side character. To make matters worse, her best efforts at school are sabotaged, and Fable itself is threatened. The question arises: Can a side character become a hero? Reintgen’s middle-grade debut is at once a fantastic adventure and a tribute to famous and popular literature. The plot feels rushed at times, but witty references—to literary characters and elements of the act of reading itself, like dog ears (envisioned as one-eared dogs who steal watches from anthropomorphic bookmarks)—make this novel enjoyable and laugh-out-loud funny. There is nothing intrinsically Indian about brown-skinned Indira (as her name suggests but as her equally brown-skinned brother’s does not), but her-far-from positive experiences remind readers of the importance of working hard at their own stories.
Imaginative, fast-paced, and fun. (Fantasy. 8-12)Pub Date: Sept. 17, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-525-64668-6
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2019
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