A busy, imaginative, beguiling fairy tale.
In this lush, kaleidoscopic children’s fantasy, a plucky Filipino lad embarks on a magical mystery tour in search of a talisman that can save his father’s life.
Twelve-year-old Tetong rolls his eyes at the superstitious beliefs held by people in his Filipino village, but that skepticism is soon demolished by the mind-blowing adventures he experiences in this frenetic yarn. When his father contracts a mysterious ailment that baffles local healers, Tetong sets off in search of a cure and has encounters with strange and supernatural beings. He makes friends with an irascible witch and a creek monster (whom he returns to human form), rescues an injured eagle, liberates roosters from cruel bondage and frees horses from impending slaughter. His good-heartedness wins him valuable allies, an invisibility hat, a magic green orb and the power to fly, but it also incurs the wrath of a sorcerer known as the Man In Black, whom Tetong will have to fight in order to find a magic bird and lift the curse on the Land of the Unknown. Reyna tells Tetong’s story in the classic style of a fairy tale: Wondrous happenings proceed matter-of-factly; developments unfold by arbitrary incantatory rules; animals talk; and a deep moral reciprocity shapes a world in which favors are always repaid. Her prose is straightforward and brisk, her lavish imagery at times almost psychedelic (“[S]mall drops of purple light changed to orange and huge rolling eyeballs seemed to stare at him”) and her characters piquant. Along the way, she includes descriptive passages about Filipino village life, illustrated with engaging sketches. The narrative teems with so much action and spectacle that it sometimes loses the main story thread amid the whirl, but young readers will find plenty of diverting romps to hold their attention.
A busy, imaginative, beguiling fairy tale.Pub Date: Dec. 20, 2012
ISBN: 13-978-1479205691
Page Count: 260
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: July 25, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The seemingly ageless Seeger brings back his renowned giant for another go in a tuneful tale that, like the art, is a bit sketchy, but chockful of worthy messages. Faced with yearly floods and droughts since they’ve cut down all their trees, the townsfolk decide to build a dam—but the project is stymied by a boulder that is too huge to move. Call on Abiyoyo, suggests the granddaughter of the man with the magic wand, then just “Zoop Zoop” him away again. But the rock that Abiyoyo obligingly flings aside smashes the wand. How to avoid Abiyoyo’s destruction now? Sing the monster to sleep, then make it a peaceful, tree-planting member of the community, of course. Seeger sums it up in a postscript: “every community must learn to manage its giants.” Hays, who illustrated the original (1986), creates colorful, if unfinished-looking, scenes featuring a notably multicultural human cast and a towering Cubist fantasy of a giant. The song, based on a Xhosa lullaby, still has that hard-to-resist sing-along potential, and the themes of waging peace, collective action, and the benefits of sound ecological practices are presented in ways that children will both appreciate and enjoy. (Picture book. 5-9)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-689-83271-0
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2001
Not for the faint-hearted—who are mostly adults anyway—but for stouthearted kids who love a brush with the sinister:...
A magnificently creepy fantasy pits a bright, bored little girl against a soul-eating horror that inhabits the reality right next door.
Coraline’s parents are loving, but really too busy to play with her, so she amuses herself by exploring her family’s new flat. A drawing-room door that opens onto a brick wall becomes a natural magnet for the curious little girl, and she is only half-surprised when, one day, the door opens onto a hallway and Coraline finds herself in a skewed mirror of her own flat, complete with skewed, button-eyed versions of her own parents. This is Gaiman’s (American Gods, 2001, etc.) first novel for children, and the author of the Sandman graphic novels here shows a sure sense of a child’s fears—and the child’s ability to overcome those fears. “I will be brave,” thinks Coraline. “No, I am brave.” When Coraline realizes that her other mother has not only stolen her real parents but has also stolen the souls of other children before her, she resolves to free her parents and to find the lost souls by matching her wits against the not-mother. The narrative hews closely to a child’s-eye perspective: Coraline never really tries to understand what has happened or to fathom the nature of the other mother; she simply focuses on getting her parents back and thwarting the other mother for good. Her ability to accept and cope with the surreality of the other flat springs from the child’s ability to accept, without question, the eccentricity and arbitrariness of her own—and every child’s own—reality. As Coraline’s quest picks up its pace, the parallel world she finds herself trapped in grows ever more monstrous, generating some deliciously eerie descriptive writing.
Not for the faint-hearted—who are mostly adults anyway—but for stouthearted kids who love a brush with the sinister: Coraline is spot on. (Fiction. 9-12)Pub Date: July 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-380-97778-8
Page Count: 176
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2002
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